A flat-tire miracle?

The new year is shifting quickly. Mary, Mom, Grandma, and Amy (cousin Jason's girlfriend) have all left Seattle. Jason is set to be deployed in the beginning of February, and then we will not see him for 400 days. And after taking a break from programming for a couple of weeks, I am hoping to re-commit myself starting today.

I did have an unusual slow-down moment, however. On New Year's Day, I thought it would be nice to take Mom et al. out to dinner. After some back and forth, we postponed until Friday lunch, because Grandma was tired.

So on Friday, I was driving Mom and Grandma on I-5 in my Scion xB. A car slows down next to us and starts yelling at us. He said we had a flat tire! I slowed down and hoped to make the nearest exit. (We were on the bridge near the U.) The xB starts going *bump* *bump* *bump*, but there was an empty school parking lot right off the exit.

I had never changed a flat tire, especially on my own, but I knew the xB was supposed to have everything I needed: spare tire, jack, tools, etc. The owner's manual seemed to have all the steps, except the first one: I did not know how to take off my hubcaps! At some point, I called AAA to come assist us; they said they would send someone, but it would be a 1-2 hour wait.

It turns out that one just has to pull hard to remove the xB's hubcaps, so the next step was to loosen the lug nuts. I tried and tried to pull any of the four nuts loose, but nothing would budge. In the meantime, I was worried about Grandma and Mom freezing. The weather was cold but thankfully sunny, and at the same time we had a very strange "hail": soft, slowly descending. Grandma called it "pearls."

After maybe an hour, I had not made any progress. AAA had not arrived. I was not able to get any of the four nuts to budge. To top it off, Grandma had to go to the bathroom! Thankfully, Mom got the school janitor's permission and took Grandma to the restroom.

So there I was, waiting alone. I must have been thinking about my parking brake--how we release it by pulling it up first--because suddenly I had an idea: instead of just trying to pull the wrench counter-clockwise right away, what if I first tried to go clockwise a smidge, and maybe that would help loosen it?

Then I had another ... epiphany: prayer. I knew Grandma and Mom had been praying that everything would be okay, and I even remember telling Grandma, "Yeah Grandma, keep praying." However, I realized that I had not asked God for help. I had been relying on my own strength, literally.

So, I put the wrench on one of the lug nuts. I prayed quietly to God. And I tried pushing down a bit before pulling up. And it moved!

The three other lug nuts also moved on the next try! (To be clear, they moved on the upswing: so I was always trying to pull it in the correct direction: counter-clockwise. "Righty tighty, lefty loosey!") The rest happened relatively quickly: Mom and Grandma came back from the bathroom, my Auntie Nancy (whom we had called her earlier) arrived to take Mom and Grandma home, I finished changing my tire, and AAA arrived belatedly (but at least they did not count the service call against my account).

From Flat tire

So ... does God exist? Was it really a miracle? What I like about this event is that one can interpret it either way. One can even attribute "blame" to different people, if that is important. I feel that way sometimes, but what seems most important to me right now is to have real faith in at least the possibility of a real miracle. Christians talk about a real miracle in history: a man died, was buried in a tomb, and then on the third day came back to life. (And, he raised other people from the dead, multiplied fish and bread, healed blind people instantly, et al.) Some truly believe that. And some essentially believe it to be impossible. And some are still in between.


General note: I was updating this blog weekly, but now I am going to try updating only bi-weekly. So the next update should be ~1/24.