Trust in what is ‘written’

Recently, I planned to take my family on a weekend trip to a nearby kids activities farm. The plan was to leave at 9:00am when the builder arrives to do carry out some repair work at our house. It was a cold and frosty morning and when he did not turn up by 9:15am I began to get impatient and by 9:30am I had to phone him to check.

It turned out that a car skidded against his van that same morning and some damage occurred but he should be on his way in 5 or 10 min. By 10:00am I was quite tense and almost angry that this is happening and no sign of the builder. My good wife kept reminding me the poor guy is having problems and anytime he arrives is good for us to leave. Trust in what is ‘written’, she said.

By 10:30 I ran out of patience and picked up the phone to reschedule the repair work for another day. At that very moment he knocked on the door. Needless to say that I got out of the house as fast as I could to avoid having a long chat with the builder and losing my temper with him (you may even laugh at this!).

We were finally on the road at 11:00am. Till then the sun had risen and the roads were clear. When we returned to the house later on that evening we found that the building work was nearly complete.

Next morning, while my wife was chatting to her friend on the phone, she heard that the latter’s niece had died in a car accident the previous day. The cause of the accident was black ice on the roads. This was unexpected as the temperature was not too low and there was no warning on the weather report nor was there any gritting done. As it turned out, several people in the village had accidents and it dawned on me how close to disaster my family and I were the previous day and how my impatience and temper nearly got us into a major accident.

When I checked the car’s tyres I realised that we were destined to live that day. The thread level was non-existent on 3 tyres! If we traveled any earlier than we did with black ice we could have been history by now.

By 11:00am the ice melted on the road and it was safe to drive again.

I remembered the Quranic verse: ‘ … and it may be that you love something and there is great harm in it or you may dislike something and God puts in it a great deal of good’.

Moral: If things happen against your wishes it’s because it is better for you that way. Anger and bad temper can only be harmful.