About 30 years ago, my wife Nancy and I along with our daughter Laura hopped in my Chevy Luv pickup truck and headed out to buy and chop down a Christmas tree. I had told Laura a story about a little girl who had found the perfect Christmas tree in a grove of pines and the little tree was truly happy to go home and be with her new family. So Laura wanted to do the same.
At that time, Virginia Hahn and her family had advertised a Christmas tree farm in northern Albemarle County where you could cut your own.
It was approaching 5 PM as we set out and without a map or a GPS, I really wasn’t exactly sure where the Hahn Farm was. I knew it was somewhere out in Earlysville, but Earlysville was always a confusing place for me. It is a series on unending forks in the road. You head out Earlysville Road and it forks into Advance Mills Road and both have forks beyond that. I came to one of those forks and knew if I took the wrong one, I’d end up somewhere in Greene County, the Hahn Farm would be closed, we would have no tree and my 4-year old would be deeply disappointed.
I stopped in the middle of the road and told Nancy I didn’t know which way to go.
At that point, Laura piped up and said, “That’s okay, Daddy, we’ll just say a little prayer.”
And we did.
“Lord, help me take the right road.”
I believe I went right at the fork and sure enough, within just a few miles, we arrived at the Christmas tree farm, pulled out our saw, selected the perfect tree and took it home to decorate.
That memory has stuck with me through the years.
Sometimes, when we come to a fork in the road in our lives and don’t know where to go or what to do, if we just say a little prayer, we can find our way. Not a big, long fancy prayer as a preacher might say, but a simple little prayer as a child might say.
“Lord, help me take the right road.”