Article November 29, 2004 Issue

NO!!! SOMETIMES THE WAY TO SAY YES TO GOD'S PRESENCE IS TO SAY NO!

By Norm Bleichman

"Noooooooo!" that's what I heard as the car I was in suddenly veered off Interstate 70 midway between Kansas City and St. Louis many years ago. The voice was mine. And the cry erupted just as I woke up from a brief but untimely snooze behind the wheel. I was driving by myself, and in the next five seconds the car hurtled down a steep embankment, flipped over, and landed upside down on a concrete culvert at the bottom of a ravine. Then silence. (Sixty to zero in five seconds flat.)

The car was totaled, but I sustained only two minor cuts. I was OK. Miraculously so, a state trooper informed me as he obligingly gave me a ride to a nearby police station where he—rather unceremoniously, I thought—cited and arrested me for unsafe driving. I survived the accident, the short incarceration, and the subsequent embarrassment (it was a friend's car). Ever since, I've pulled over whenever I've felt drowsy while driving.

I have periodically tried to reconstruct that five-second eternity between Noooooo! and silence. I'm convinced that my shout was, in fact, a prayer. Brief, desperate, but heartfelt nonetheless. I had grown up learning and proving basic laws about God and my connection to Him. For example, that as one of His children I was always surrounded and protected by His love, and that even though I might at times stray (or veer), I could never completely escape His presence. In that moment of verbal denial, I was actually refusing to accept a scenario I knew to be unlike what God had in mind for me. Mind is another name for God, I had learned, and I realized that as Mind, He was "thinking" me as a perfect idea every second—including the moments as I went over that embankment. So, in shouting No! I was really saying Yes! to what I knew to be the truth—that I was not an endangered mortal, but a spiritual being in the care and protection of Spirit. (Perhaps there's a Newtonian corollary that says for every denial there's an equal and opposite affirmation.)