A magical morning commute

It was one of those crisp autumn mornings that felt brand-new. As my son and I set off on our daily commute, the highway looked crowded. We decided to stay on the back roads. We rolled down the windows since they were covered in condensation and set out on our way.

Where we live, we can sometimes smell the aroma from whatever spice is brewing at McCormick. Some days it’s cinnamon or nutmeg or ginger. That day it seemed to be…maybe a lemon seasoning, but a savory one, not a sweet one. Maybe it was meant for seafood or chicken? It was hard to tell, but it smelled delicious.

As we breathed in the decadent air, I thought about how we wouldn’t even have our windows open if we were taking the highway. But there we were, enjoying the early morning scent of whatever spice was on offer at the factory that day.

We stopped at a light near an ice cream shop and watched a man, high up in a bucket truck, installing a new sign outside the store. He was huddled in a brown sweatshirt with a hood, trying to stay warm in the chilly morning air. I wondered whether the job would take him all day or just the morning—and whether he was happy to be working on an ice cream sign rather than something less exciting like a hardware store or a car dealership. I will never know. But I liked to imagine he would go home and tell his children, “Today I installed a tall new sign for an ice cream shop.”

The traffic light changed, and we continued on our drive. Sometimes I would find myself wondering whether we should have taken the highway, which might have been faster and with fewer stops and starts. But as my father always says, you can’t go both ways and see which way was better. You have to assume you picked the right route. And so we continued on our way.

And then, as we crested a hill and started to descend, I saw the scene below and gasped. A dense fog was surrounding a cluster of buildings ahead of us. You could make out the roofs of the tallest buildings, but nothing below them. The whole space below us was covered by a giant cloud. It had an ethereal quality, as if we were moving through the clouds ourselves.

It felt like something out of a dream. The fog was only in that one spot. We were driving along quite normally with perfect vision and no fog around us. But ahead of us, we could see the cloud encircling the buildings and hiding the cars coming toward us.

It was beautiful and magical and lovely and fascinating. And it felt as if we had been meant to arrive in this very spot at just this moment. If we had been on another road, we would never have seen it. If we had been earlier or later, it might have been a completely different experience. But it turned out we were right where we should be, right on time for this spectacle.

Even if we ended up being late for everything else, I was grateful we were there at just this moment—and that we had come this way. A whole fairy tale-like scene was unfolding before us, in a delightful and unexpected encounter with nature. And as we continued on our journey, I marveled at how much beauty we had discovered on what could have been an ordinary drive.

Some days the highway is the best way to go. It gets us there quickly, and we see other things we might never see again. But there is a sense of wonder to exploring the world on the back roads instead. And God is there—just as he is everywhere. But maybe a different road will lead you to him in a new way.

“The secret to happiness is to live moment by moment and to thank God for what He is sending us every day in His goodness,” said St. Gianna Molla.

Wherever your travels take you today, I hope you’ll feel God’s presence along the way—and feel his assurance that you are right where he wanted you to be.

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