Fog

It was nearly 2 AM, so I decided to take the back roads home in order to avoid the RIDE police (or else it would be revealed how much pie I had eaten). For a winter night, it was balmy; where there is balm there is fog.

I've driven through fog before, but not like this. It was so thick I couldn't see more than 3 metres ahead of me. The suspended droplets of moisture refracted and reflected most of my headlights into a halo of diffuse light against a backdrop of pitch black. Good thing I decided to take the roads with no streetlights and sparse residences, eh?

During driving lessons, I would pretty much zone out about situational driving. It was boring, irrelevant and not applicable at the time. Fast forward to the present and even snippets of those memories become lifelines to grasp and clutch when just such a situation arises.

For the briefest moment, I felt a twinge of fear. It was dark out there (you know how Canadians are afraid of the dark). In that briefest moment, my fear took hold of my imagination and all the what-ifs bubbled into my consciousness. What if someone crashed in front of me? What if an axe-murderer jumped out from the ditch? What if the fog was actually a poisonous, sentient cloud of gas hellbent on destroying human life?


We fear the dark for the same reason we fear change: it is unknown. Not knowing what comes next bogs us down with possibilities. For whatever reason, most of the possibilities that spring to mind first are the bad things.

I'm in a big foggy patch of change at the moment. I don't feel well-equipped to handle this uncertainty, or the possibilities. There are days that I am scared into inaction. Driving home on a foggy winter night is a walk in the park by comparison; I have taken that road many times before, be it under bright skies or heavy rains. Did I zone out earlier during this particular life lesson?

I drove slowly, making sure I did not outpace the visibility my headlights afforded, careful to watch out for things on the road so that I wouldn't hit anything, or anyone. Driving through the fog, I hung on to the certainty that I knew my way home and that the fog would not last forever. The sun will rise and the road will become clear.

I wake up every morning cautious of what the day might bring, careful to not push too far forward too fast, dreading the possibility that I might get hurt -- or worse, hurt someone else. But even in the midst of this uncertainty, I know my way home and this uncertainty will not last forever. The Son has risen and the road is clear.