Sunday morning I was doing one of my favorite Sunday things: Driving to fulfill a church assignment in a distant town. It was early morning, the mountainsides were green and thick with trees, the jagged peaks bright with snow. I followed the river all the way up the valley, admiring the mountain maples bright with new leaves, the shining water, the mist creeping up the canyons to dissolve in high sunlight. I was howling along with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at >90dB when I saw a deer leaving the left side of the highway.

I barely registered a gray blur on my right before a heavy slam shook the whole car. My head jerked back in time to see, out of the tail of my left eye, a remarkable sight. A deer was in the air, sailing back and to my left like a ball tossed over the shoulder. Its mouth was open. It must have been the companion of the one I’d seen on the left, jumping in front of me while I was distracted, and was thrown in the air by the force of the impact. I must have glanced forward and back again, because the next I saw the animal was tumbling forward on the left side of the highway, over and over itself like a tumbleweed, in a horrible uncontrolled cartwheel that surely broke its back.

I stopped the music and the car. I was already a quarter mile away from the point of impact, and the deer’s body was invisible in the grass. I got out to inspect the damage. Dexter’s hood was caved in and kinked open a little; but he still idled quietly, his headlights still burned, and no fluid seemed to be leaking from underneath.

I got back in the car and drove to my assignment, subdued and grateful. A deer has significant body mass perched up on thin legs. My Honda was moving fast, low to the ground, with a sloping hood and a cracked windshield. How is it that the deer did not come up and at me through the windshield? Why was the damage not more severe? How is it that in that river valley an elk or–heaven forbid–a moose did not find me instead?

We both know, of course. God looks after His children, just as any good father does. Those who by a queer and pitiable blindness do not believe in God would seem forced to rely rather heavily on coincidence.