When we think about God’s protection, our minds often jump to the dramatic moments we can actually see—the closed doors, the sudden redirects, or the storms that somehow miss us. But sometimes, His most profound protection happens in a fraction of a second, shaping the entire trajectory of our lives before we even have the maturity to understand what we’ve just escaped. As I continue our Thankful Challenge for Day 5, my heart is drawn back to a terrifying childhood moment in first grade that remains one of the clearest examples of God’s preserving hand on my life.
Kids will be kids, which usually means playing in places we really shouldn’t be and running around with zero sense of self-preservation. On this particular day, we were doing just that. In the middle of our game, I cut a corner way too close to a tree and accidentally impaled my right eye on a tree limb.
In that split second, the natural instinct for almost any child would have been to scream, panic, and violently jerk their head backward away from the branch. If I had reacted that way, the physical damage would have been catastrophic. Yet, for some inexplicable reason—an intervention that can only be described as divine—I didn’t jerk back. Instead, I moved backward slowly, carefully easing away from the limb.
When my parents rushed me to the medical professionals, the gravity of what had happened truly set in. The doctors examined the injury and delivered a sobering verdict. They told my parents that if I had jerked my head quickly the way children normally do, I would have completely lost my eye. The margin between lifelong blindness and the sight I kept was razor-thin.
The news didn’t end there, either. The specialists warned my parents that even with the immediate danger averted, the trauma to the eye was severe enough that I would likely lose my vision in that right eye completely by the time I graduated from high school. It cast a heavy shadow of uncertainty over those growing-up years, knowing that I would probably lose vision in my right eye. Well, decades have come and gone since then. I graduated high school back in the 1980s, and to this day, I still have my vision.
Looking back across the years, I see that moment so differently now. What the medical community predicted as an inevitable loss became a quiet, everyday miracle. Every time I look in the mirror, every time I read a book, and every time I take in the beauty of the world around me, I am reminded that my sight is an unearned gift of grace. God was watching over a reckless first-grader in a place she shouldn’t have been, guiding her movements and preserving her future long before she ever knew how to thank Him for it.
Today, I am overflowing with gratitude for the seen and unseen ways God protects us, shielding us even from our own heedless moments and carrying us safely into all the tomorrows He has prepared.
