Thursday August 20, 2015

You messed up. That mistake you made...will lead you to the next stage of your life. May you be blessed to forgive yourself and move on. This is the precise moment in time when your life comes into focus and you choose good. Blessing not curse. Triumph over sin.

Be with me today as I attempt to do things bigger than myself. Inspire me in my thinking and guide my ways. I pray that my life makes a positive difference in the lives of others. I pray that I can have spiritual courage and energy to live large. I am willing to become more than myself, by allowing You to work through me.

A young man, a talented architect, became depressed and decided to kill himself. He was going to jump in front of the next train that rolled into the station. In a few minutes, the young man heard the faint rumble of an approaching train. He inched up to the edge of the platform where he watched the subway headlights reflecting off the tracks. As it got closer, he took one last, deep breath to calm himself. As it rounded the curve, he jumped.

The engineer saw the young man jump, and he instinctively reached for the brake. Even as he did so, he knew it would be too late, for there was no way he could stop that train in time to save the young man. The front car had already begun to roll over the man lying there on the tracks. Just when it seemed as though they were going to crush him completely, the train screeched to a stop.

The engineer stood there, amazed. He knew that his brake had not stopped that train. But what did? Firemen and ambulance attendants scrambled to the scene. They couldn't believe how close the man had come to getting killed. He was squeezed so tightly under the first car that they had to get special equipment to jack up the train and free him. But the man was alive and he was unhurt.

In the meantime, subway officials had arrested a man who was on the same train. They charged him with pulling the emergency brake (which locks all the brakes on the train) for no reason. They had planned to take him to court, when they discovered that it was the emergency brake, and not the engineer's brake, that had stopped the train and saved the young architect's life. Once they heard this, they quickly dropped all the charges.

Now, here is the strange thing about the incident. The man who pulled the emergency brake was much too far back in the train to see anyone jumping off the subway platform. Yet, he managed to pull the brake at just the right time. If he had waited a second or two longer, it would have been too late. If he couldn't see anyone, why did he pull the brake? When subway officials asked him, he couldn't give them a satisfactory explanation. He said that all he knew was that he had an uncontrollable urge to get up, walk over to the side of the railway car, and pull the brake. He didn't find out until months later that his uncontrollable urge had saved someone's life.