The phone was ringing inside, but I couldn’t put my hands on my front door keys—not in the dark with an armload of Christmas presents. I dropped the shopping bags and fished around in my purse.
Finally. I unlocked the door and grabbed the phone. It was my mama wondering if she could still expect me for dinner.
“You sound stressed,” she said. I never could hide anything from Mama. I was worn out. Six mornings a week I did the Jennifer Show, a live variety show in Branson, Missouri. Every performance meant two hours of singing and dancing. The week before Christmas was busiest, with two shows every day.
I loved to make people smile. Mama always said I was born to be onstage. But lately I wondered if all the hard work was worth it. The early morning workouts, endless rehearsing, the publicity tours…Did God want me putting all my energy into this? Or was there something else I could do that would serve him? I didn’t know, and the uncertainty was wearing me down.
“We’ll talk about it when I get there,” I told Mama. “See ya in a while.”
I hung up, wrapped my gifts and packed the car. Slowly I backed out of my snow-covered driveway. We had a couple inches already, and the flakes were coming down steady. I turned onto Highway 70 and stuck to the slow lane.
After crossing the highway bridge up ahead, it was only an hour to my parents’ house. I’d take it slow. That bridge was metal and could be icy. I got a good grip on the steering wheel. The bridge came into view.
I rolled on at a snail’s pace, my left foot hovering over the brake. My wheels slipped left. I jerked the steering wheel right. Slower, I told myself.
I tapped the brakes. Suddenly the wheels locked. I lost control. My car spun into the concrete median. I pumped the brake wildly, but there was no stopping. I skidded backward toward the edge of the bridge. Slam! What had stopped me?
I got out of the car, shaky but unhurt. I gripped the cold metal railing on the side of the bridge. I’d rear-ended a pickup truck parked on the shoulder. Its hazards were blinking. No one was inside. The backseat was filled with suitcases and packages.
I yelled over the railing, “Is anyone down there?” No one answered.
Suddenly a man came from behind the pickup truck. Snowflakes blew around him in the night air. Piles of snow rested on his shoulders and sparkled in the glow of my headlights. He looked for all the world like an angel.
He put his hand out to steady me. “Are you okay?” he asked. I could only nod. He took off his coat and wrapped it around me. “My name is Jeff. That’s my rig over there,” he said, pointing to a parked semi up the road. “I passed that pickup with its emergency lights flashing and pulled over to see if anyone needed help. Someone must have beaten me to it.
Then you came spinning toward me. When you hit the pickup, I was thrown backward a good stretch of blacktop.” Jeff laughed a little. “I’m okay, though.”
So that explained the snowy wings on his shoulders. We made our way up the slippery road to his semi. In the warmth of his cab I used his cell phone to call my parents.
Jeff looked in his rearview mirror. “A police car’s coming,” he said. “No need to call them.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. “I was really freaked out until you came along.”
“Driving this rig a lot of times puts me in the right place to help out. No matter where we are, or what we do for a living, the Lord can use us for good,” Jeff said.
The police car pulled up next to Jeff’s truck. I got out and described what happened. My parents arrived and gathered my things from my car. After I finished giving my story, I looked around for Jeff’s truck. But he was already back on the road, helping the next person who needed it, I guessed.
Later I sat in Mama’s kitchen and told her what had been troubling me. “Jeff the trucker was more sure about what he was doing than I’ve been in a long time.” But he’d said something that made all the difference. It wasn’t really about the kind of work you did; it was how you went about doing it.
“What matters most is that I reach out to people,” I said. Entertaining from a stage, making people smile, or coming to the rescue of a stranded motorist—that was God’s work.
“Sounds like Jeff was more than a trucker,” Mama said, kissing the top of my head. I remembered those snowy white wings. Maybe he was.
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