Stuck and Sidelined

It was Saturday night and I was in a bad mood, and I really needed to get out of my house. I was having that horrible feeling of being ‘stuck’ again: there were a million things annoying me, frustrating me, and upsetting me, and I had no idea what to do or think about any of them.
 
All I felt like doing was driving down to the beach with my bongo and shouting at the waves and calling out to G-d. As it was the middle of the Summer holidays, I had a close friend who was also feeling ‘stuck’, and who also needed to escape, so she escaped from her house for a couple of hours and joined me.
 
I’ve been to that nocturnal beach so many times; but this particular occasion, I took a wrong turn, and ended up driving straight into a sand dune. I never knew you couldn’t drive on sand, but I found out the hard way.
 
I tried to reverse – I only dug my car wheels in deeper. I went to find some capable man to tell me what to do, and he came over and told me in no uncertain terms: “You need to be towed out by a jeep. There’s no other way.”
 
What?!?!? Where was I going to find a jeep at 10:30pm?
 
“Flag one down on the main road. People around here are very kind. They’ll help you.”
 
There were a lot of jeeps; one of them even stopped, but when I explained what I needed, they couldn’t help. I returned to my stuck friend, by my stuck car, and we decided to sit and sing and pray and talk for a bit, until G-d showed us what to do.
 
So we did.
 
I was asking G-d the whole time for a miracle: a savior jeep driver to show up out of nowhere and tow me out of the sand. We got to 11:30pm and no one had materialized. I tried to dig the car out with some cardboard scoopers (didn’t work…) and my friend called her husband to come with his minivan and try to pull us out.
 
I started to feel quite dumb. Me and my stupid reliance on miracles! In the meantime, it was going to take the husband a good half an hour to find us, so we went down to the actual beach, and did what we’d come to do: yelled at the waves, prayed, and chatted some more.
 
As we made our way back to the car, I couldn’t believe my eyes: another car was stuck in the sand dunes, barely two meters away from us. Two young woman were frantically trying to find bits of cardboard etc to put behind the wheels to give them some traction.
 
That’s when things became really bizarre.
 
My friend realized two things: 1) one of the women was her daughter; and 2) the car that was stuck next to mine was hers. Her daughter had no idea that we were there – it was all spontaneous and unplanned – and my friend had no idea that her daughter was planning to come to the beach.
 
She’d seen ‘a car parked’ (in a sand dune) and thought it was a parking lot. Hence – she also got stuck. The husband showed up a short while later, and incredulously ended up towing two cars out of the sand: mine, and his own.
 
I drove home from the beach (at 12:30pm) and I pondered on it all. When my car first got stuck, I was sure that G-d was going to do an ‘open miracle’ for me. When that didn’t happen, I had a few minutes when I started subtly beating myself up for making a mistake and wasting so much time and effort. Then, when my friend’s daughter showed up, so apparently ‘randomly’, I realized just how much G-d is behind every single thought, impulse, and action in the universe.
 
I got stuck in a sand dune because that was G-d’s plan for me. My friend’s daughter got stuck in exactly the same sand dune, because that was G-d’s plan for her, too. The thought gave me a lot of comfort, and I actually felt much happier coming back from the beach than I did going.
 
Nothing is ‘coincidence’. Everything is purposeful, meaningful and directed from Above. And sometimes, even being thoroughly stuck, and being sidelined, and being shown your own immense limitations can be part of the process of ultimately freeing you up.
 
 
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Check out Rivka Levy’s new book The Happy Workshop based on the teachings of Rabbi Shalom Arush.