Last week I was on an epic man trip with some great friends. We went through DC, New York, New Hampshire and Boston. We chased a bear, did an alpine roller coaster, toured ground zero and went through Harvard. It was awesome! I had one experience on the trip however, that I had never had before.

My friend Brian is a great driver and drove the RV for the majority of the trip. One day I was taking a nap on the bed right above the driver’s seat and it was a pretty chill day. Brian was going about 50 miles an hour which was not terribly fast for the road we were on but we had a close call.

Brian was approaching a bridge at that speed and noticed as we came closer that the bridge was only 11 feet tall. He happened to remember at that moment that the guy at the RV place had said that the RV was 12 feet six inches tall. Had Brian not remembered that piece of information (which would have been easy for any of us to forget) he would have cruised into the bridge at 50mph. Given the place where I was sleeping, I would have taken the total hit from the crash and would have had no ability to respond in any way. Wow…..

I don’t want to play it off as being more dramatic than it was but you do the math. The bridge wasn’t going to move and that bridge would have slammed the RV right where my head was. It could have been catastrophic.

Incidents such as this can be great clarifying moments. What am I living for? Am I seizing the purpose that I’ve been put on this earth to live for? Am I loving God and others deeply?

I’ve always tended to believe that I’m 10 feet tall and bulletproof but…I’m not. Life is fragile and as much as many of us would love to evade the deeper questions that confront us, we simply don’t have that luxury.

Have you ever had a moment like that? What did you learn from it?