Hi everyone! I can’t believe that it’s already time for Winter Break. My first quarter at SCAD was the hardest academic quarter I’ve ever encountered, but I’m grateful that it ended better than I was expecting. I should also be grateful that God popped my ego bubble before it floated too high, but I’m not that spiritually mature yet.

My first class was “Freelance Writing for Publication,” and covered researching and writing magazine articles.  While most of the ten weeks was devoted to writing a variety of articles, one of our final units involved creating a professional website. I built a site but I delayed publishing until Mom got back from Europe. I needed a good head shot, and her iPhone generated much better photos than mine could.

Once she was un-jetlagged, we celebrated Mom’s return and my last day of school with a photo shoot in Willow Glen. The crisp air, morning light, and gorgeous leaves over-delivered – as did Mom’s camera.  We only had about twenty minutes before my migraine took over, but those were more than adequate to capture what we needed.

They say you have to take about 50 pictures to get a couple of good ones, and we may have gone overboard since my family isn’t exactly photogenic and I did get hit by a car. You can imagine my delight when I scrolled our selection and discovered that the number of “keepers” was surprisingly high. Somehow, in spite of being on too much medication, living mostly in the dark, and having way too many seizures, I was looking pretty good. Mom took it one step further and said I looked like a model.

And then Ivan called at lunch.

Few husbands call their wives every single day, which is one more reason Ivan is about as perfect as anyone gets this side of Heaven. My phone rings at 11:20, I ask how his classes are going, he answers vaguely with something like “Pretty normal,” and then I start prying. But I sensed something was different this past Friday when Ivan brought up his classes before I could ask.

“So, umm, some of my junior highers found the blog.”
“Really? That’s great!”
“Well, I’m not so sure…it has lots of stuff on it and… ”
“Come on, I always post nice stuff about you! Maybe it’ll help them see you a role model.”
Silence.
“Well, which ones were they looking at?”
“They found the one about you being a newt.”

For those of you who don’t remember, the “Newt Post” came after I was hospitalized at Redwood City for a 24 hour EEG. It begins with the famous Monty Python quote and a picture where I look very much like a newt, then progresses to a picture of me looking partially dead after having had 23 seizures in a row, then concludes with another picture of me looking like a newt. At least I’m smiling in the newt ones. The Newt Post is also from July 2018. All  my visions of a professional website were immediately replaced by images of junior high boys nudging each other and air-dropping links to the post on their school iPads. Post-Millennial note-passing at its finest.

“How did they make it back that far??? We don’t even have a table of contents.”
“I don’t know. All I’m telling you is they did.”
“Well, did you tell them to stop?”
“Of course. But you know I can’t control what happens outside of class. Besides, you did post that. ”

He was right. I did post those pictures. I’ve posted lots of embarrassing pictures of myself during my post-accident journey, but I’ve always assigned them a higher purpose than comic relief. Then again, who am I to stipulate how and when God can use what I post?

In a masterful stroke of Providence, the website is still not live and Ivan’s efforts to convince his students that Mrs. Utomo looks and acts pretty normal just took a giant step backward. I haven’t had the heart to check how many recent hits that Newt post has gotten. But I do hope my heart is in a better place than it was this time last week. Blogging should be an act of faith, both in what I choose to share and in where it ends up.

“Stop, kids, stop!” Ivan never shouts, but he did this weekend. We were spectators in our own nightmare: a vacant crosswalk, a “WALK” pedestrian light, an oncoming car.  This time the pedestrians were two pre-teen girls. But this time Ivan was there.

Oddly enough, we were at that intersection because I’d been hit by a car three years ago. Grad school ensures I’m mentally exhausted every day, but relegation to a tiny apartment grates on my soul eventually, and outings provide my main emotional release. The intersection of Daylight Savings Time with my neurological impediments demands these excursions take place before 4 pm, which has been tricky with my parents’ recent vacation and Ivan’s hectic schedule. Hence my cabin fever and our decision to give me one last espresso shot before another week indoors. This outing was questionable since I was in the middle of a migraine spike, but I decided 20 minutes of fresh air and sunshine was worth it if we got my coffee to-go.

We heard the sirens before the police car rounded the bend on Raleigh road.

I closed my eyes to avoid the lights.

Looking back, this was the grace of God. I don’t think I could have watched the scene unfold, especially since it was too close to my own. Like me, the girls were exiting their apartment complex. They were following the traffic signal. Unlike me, they saw the car coming, but what were they supposed to do? We always tell kids to get out of the way when police turn on their sirens. If the girls ran back, there were cars. If they tried to dart to the other side, they’d be running directly into the police car’s path. True, officers are supposed to scan intersections for pedestrians, but these girls were tiny and would be easy to miss. Ivan also says they looked frazzled. What if they froze, then dashed in front of the oncoming car too late? Thankfully they hesitated in front of our Yaris long enough for Ivan to shout for them to stop. Whether his voice penetrated the thin windshield (very possible given the number of times it’s cracked), or God reached down and held the girls in place, we’ll never know. What we do know is they stopped.

I opened my eyes as we made the U-turn and continued on our way to Peet’s. Unlike my story, there would be no ambulance blocking that U-turn for the rest of the afternoon, no frantic families searching for their children. The two girls were giggling as they turned into the shopping center across from our complex. I wondered if they even realized what  almost happened. It occurred to me that their fragile bodies would have been even less likely to survive that impact than mine had been.

Both Ivan and I were silent for most of the way to Peet’s. We briefly discussed if he could have done anything differently. No, not really. Honking was too dangerous. That might have spurred them forward into the police car’s path. Rolling down the window might have been too slow. Ultimately it was a split second of action, and the result was in God’s hands. Neither of us asked the weightier questions. Was there a split second of action in my story? Did anyone reach out? Call out? The security camera’s footage suggests not. Why? Why had I been alone? We’ll never know. What we do know is that, like those girls, my story is in God’s hands. “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” ~ Job 1:21