Be that as it may, as I continued my conversation with Yehudis Ester, a car pulled up beside me, and as I glanced to the side, it was indeed Yocheved Rus who had been going in the opposite direction, but was suddenly next to me on the road turning left while I had was turning right.
“I’ll call you back,” I told Yehudis Ester. “Yocheved Rus is here!”
I’m sure Yehudis Ester must have thought I was insane since she knew I was driving alone! Still, I hung up and both Yocheved Rus and I rolled down our windows.
“I can’t believe you are here!” Yocheved Rus exclaimed, a more excited greeting than I ever get when I come home. I made a note to try to meet her more often in varied locals to earn that bright smile more regularly. “Can I give you what we bought? I have a million errands to run, and I was going to have to make a special trip home and lose twenty-five minutes getting there and back just so the food doesn’t spoil sitting in the car.”
We both pulled to the side of the road, so as not to block traffic, and the exchange of goods began. We even agreed that I would take the food now, and in return, Yocheved Rus would run my second errand for me the following week. I had wanted to take care of it that day but it was less pressing than my Staples trip, so it could wait.
“Why were you on Kennedy Drive?” I asked Yocheved Rus, still astounded that here we were, meeting in the most unlikely of places.
“We finished food shopping,” she said, “and were about to do more errands, but then we realized we needed to get the perishables home first, so I turned here so I could turn around and go home.”
I was not going to be the one to point out to her that there had been no reason for her to turn around at all. I knew she was fully aware that if she had just gone straight, she could have gotten home using a more direct route than the one she had chosen by turning around on Kennedy Drive. But the world is always full of choices for the paths we tread, and in this case, she chose the path that intersected with mine although in my case, I didn’t feel like I had chosen my path at all. It had all but been chosen for me because there was no way that I belonged on that road at that time. But here I was, happy to lend a hand and save her time by taking the groceries home. And there she was, happy to have found me to help her so she could get on with her day.
Both of us couldn’t help but marvel at the whole hashgacha of the event. It was truly mind boggling that we had met up, our paths all but colliding, at that exact second on that exact road. I mean, what were the chances? And so ends my hashgacha pratis story.
And now for the hitch.
It bothered me on the whole drive home. Here I had this amazing hashgacha pratis event that had just occurred, clear as day, showing yad Hashem in my life and yet I had no idea what it all meant. Who really cared that I got to take the groceries home, saving my daughter some time, while she got to run an errand for me for the next week? I mean, without meaning to sound cynical, this was such a tiny blip in the big picture of things that are important to my life, that it didn’t even count as a .0001 on the Richter scale of what rocked my life, or hers. Still, I couldn’t help but marvel at the total lack of meaning in it all.
