Ever had one of those moments where you realize that your life is happening RIGHT NOW and it kind of freaks you out? Not like you suddenly realize that you are breathing oxygen and that just really freaks you out, but like you suddenly realize that the decisions you are making right now effect your future. The classes you take, and the extracurriculars you are involved in, and the colleges you are applying for. THIS is your life. 

I had one of those days last week. One of those days where you just feel completely and utterly overwhelmed by the thought of the future and the thought of making decisions that will effect things like your career and where you live and who you will meet. I had a day where all of those things just really hit me, and I felt anxious and scared for most of it.

It was just an average day at school, and I’m not sure what made me so freaked out, but I spent the first half of the day just kind of holed up in my desk having my mental break down. By sixth hour, I finally caught a break. I got to leave for a cross country meet. So I packed up my things and hoped to forget about the future for now. 

My friends and I piled my car full of our bags and hopped in for the trip out to Lake Afton. We drove and turned up the Taylor Swift and sang along and talked about how we really didn’t want to race that day. I thought that this would help, but my mind only seemed to race a more. I was thinking about everything they were saying, AND I was thinking about everything else that was cluttering my mind. I didn’t tell my friends, but I was just feeling OVERLOADED with information and words.

I just really couldn’t seem to get my mind off of this huge fear of the future, until I caught a glimpse of a giant, black, lonesome tire rolling down the lane RIGHT AT MY CAR! And no, this doesn’t have a miraculous ending, the tire just hit my car. Boom. It just bounced right into the side of it and left a nice big dent. 

I’m not going to lie, it was one of the most random and odd moments of my life. It almost felt like it had to have some kind of message from the universe, because HOW RANDOM was it that a giant tire might be rolling down my lane right as I was there. Five seconds earlier, or five seconds later, I would have missed it. It felt like for some reason this was supposed to happen to me. Like there was someone looking down on me that wanted to just give me a little nudge, right at this particular moment.

Of course this may just be a figment of my imagination, but my point is: Sometimes you feel like the world is really big. So big that it scares you to death and your day gets swallowed by your fear of the future, or your fear of whatever it is you are going through. It’s not that big though. In fact, it’s small enough that you can be driving down a country road in the middle of nowhere at the same time that a giant tire is coming strait at you. It’s small enough that God can always see you as an individual and give you the nudge that you need in a certain day or hour or moment. The nudge that reminds you that the world is just the right size, because it is a size that God can speak to you in. And suddenly the only thing you have to worry about is filling out the police report and still getting to your cross country meet in time. And yeah, maybe that seems like it would just add onto your stress, but for a moment there I forgot about all of the plans I had to make and people I had to call, and I could just focus on handling this thing. This small little thing in this small little world. That was refreshing.

There will always be a future to plan for and something to worry about. The world will always be this big, and present you with a million different options. Just remember that no matter how big it gets, God is always going to be there to pull you back in. Maybe he will even do it with a giant tire flying at you on the highway.