ISKCON Halifax

The drive from Hal­i­fax to Toronto usu­ally takes around 20 hours of dri­ving. Recently, we made this voy­age in a whop­ping 34 hours. Here’s why…

As we were dri­ving through north­ern New Brunswick, near­ing the bor­der of Que­bec, tor­ren­tial rain began to pour from the sky so sud­denly and so heav­ily that it was almost impos­si­ble to even see the road. There was too much water on the road for the tires to grip the pave­ment and sud­denly the car began to hydroplane into a full 180 degree turn. I’m sure it all hap­pened very quickly. But since the car was careen­ing back­wards, I could not see where we were headed. I found myself patiently wait­ing for the immi­nent dis­as­ter know­ing full well that there was going to be a heavy impact. After brush­ing a siderail we flew back­wards off the high­way into the grassy ditch. Of all the pos­si­bile things that could have hap­pened, we all walked away from a totalled vehi­cle with barely even a scratch. There is no doubt that this was clearly Krishna’s kind­ness and pro­tec­tion upon us all.

After the car was towed away, the police offi­cer helped us to the near­est hotel where we would begin dis­cussing plan “B”. We unloaded all of our belong­ings from the police car onto the side­alk out­side the hotel. Cory went into the recep­tion as I stood out­side with all the stuff. As I stood there, a woman smok­ing a cig­a­rette began to talk to me. I told her about our acci­dent on the high­way and she was very sym­pa­thetic. She was also amazed that we were not harmed.

After a pause, she asked me if I was a monk. She was curi­ous about my devo­tional dress. She was inter­ested to know what I, as a monk, thought about being in a car acci­dent. What was our phi­los­o­phy on that? I told her that suf­fer­ing is part of this world, but the impor­tant thing is how we react to that suf­fer­ing. I explained a bit about our lifestyle, par­tic­u­larly the chant­ing. I showed her the beads I was chant­ing on and she seemed quite fascinated.

“Do you like to read?” I asked. I had a copy of Chant and Be Happy in one of our bags. I handed it to her and asked if she could give a dona­tion, which she did. She hap­pily took the book and went on her way.

Would this woman ever have come in con­tact with Prabhupada’s books had we not crashed off the high­way and been stranded at the hotel? The whole exchange had sur­prised me. Some­how, Krishna had inspired both of us to speak together. It seemed to me to be the sec­ond mir­a­cle of the day.

More sto­ries to come…

Nitai

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 24th, 2010 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Traveling Sankirtan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.