There seems to be an even split among people as to whether or not our lives are driven by fate. Most that believe fate is real are usually religious as they believe God has a plan for each us on the day we are born. Others believe that we ourselves determine our journey and are responsible for how it plays out.

     I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle, I do believe there is something more, something that our brains are capable of and we just haven’t evolved enough yet to completely understand it, many of us have experienced things that we cannot explain. Some call them miracles, divine intervention, luck, or intuition, but there is no denying that some things just cannot be explained as pure coincidence. I also believe that we need to play an active roll in where we want our lives to lead, we need to have goals and dreams to keep us on the right path and we need to take responsibility for the choices we make. You can’t sit back and wait for your life to change but when your struggling and it seems that no matter how hard you try it’s not working that fate is telling you that you’re on the wrong path.

     I have experienced both in my life and in very powerful ways. The following experience is how I know that fate exists. Years ago my son and I were on our way home after a football game in a nearby town, as we traveled the gravel road that we usually took back to our home, I noticed headlights in the rearview mirror in the distance behind us. Normally this wouldn’t have seemed odd but this time was different. A feeling so strong and undeniable told me the person behind me was an unstable man that had a recent, very heated confrontation over a business deal with my boyfriend at the time and that I needed to get off the road I was on and get to the main highway immediately. Any other time I would have dismissed the feeling as paranoia but it was so strong, I didn’t second guess it.

     About a mile ahead of us was a little town where I knew I could turn right and it would take me to the highway. I had barley made the turn and looked again in the rearview mirror and as the vehicle behind me made the same turn I could see under the streetlamp that it was indeed who I feared it was. He caught up to us quickly and began trying to run us off the road. As he would get next to us, I would slam on the breaks as he would swerve towards us, he would then stop and I would swerve around him and continue to make my way to the highway. He did this 3 or 4 times and at one point as he was stopped and we began to pass him I heard what at the time I thought was the sound of his truck backfiring. I made it to the highway first and he was right on my tail. At this point my son was on the phone with 911 trying to give them our location as we approached the curve up ahead. He shot past me again and as he did, he nearly ran an oncoming car of the road. As we met the oncoming car, we realized it was a sheriff cruiser. He immediately hit his lights and turned around as my son explained to the dispatcher that we were in the car directly in front of him. Up ahead in the distance the man had pulled into an approach downhill from the curve so he wasn’t able to see the lights of the cruiser and was in the process of backing onto the highway to prevent us from getting by, at that point the cruiser flew past us and became visible to him and he pulled back into the approach. We proceeded home and that’s where it dawned on me that it wasn’t his truck backfiring that we heard, it was gunshots. I called back and relayed the information and was they would get back to me. They called the next day saying they had found no gun and asked if I would come in to fill out a report, on the way we stopped at the approach he had been at the night before and sure enough found the gun. The sheriff met us at the location to take possession of the gun and as we stood there, he told me how lucky we were to be alive as he believed he intended to kill us when he attempted to block the highway. He also said how it was just by chance that he happened to be in the location the night before as he rarely takes that route during his patrol. My apologizes for the long drawn out story. Fate is a real thing, these series of events lined up in a way that cannot be mere coincidence. If I hadn’t made that turn, if the sheriff hadn’t been coming up the other side of that hill at the curve I have just as strong of a feeling that I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this. Some might say it was divine intervention, or one hell of a gut feeling but that’s what I call fate.