My father was an atheist. His code of life? If it was good for him, it was right. If it didn’t benefit him, it was wrong. Because money was tight, he ignored the State of Georgia’s traffic laws. He did not have our vehicles safety checked. Like our family, they were so dysfunctional they would not have passed.

One day when I was selling magazines to raise money for our senior class, I stopped at a house along a minor road. A man with an unbuttoned shirt and boxer shorts answered the door, an attractive blonde woman some ten years younger hanging on his arm. He curtly informed me that he did not want magazines and he didn’t appreciate his Saturday being interrupted by a panhandler. I made a few more stops along that road before turning onto the main highway. Oops! There was a Georgia State Trooper roadblock about a mile ahead.

There was only one dirt road between me and the roadblock, so—I took it. A highway patrol car left the roadblock and drove to the entry of the dirt road. The trooper sat in his car watching me. Attempting to hide the fact that I was quivering like pudding, I parked the car, got out, walked boldly to the door of the house and knocked. The man in the boxer shorts, still adorned with the blonde on his arm stared at me in disbelief before he bellowed, “You were just at my front door. Get out of here and don’t ever come back.”

I chanced a look back to the end of what I now realized was a long driveway—not a road. Yup. Highway patrol car still there. I gulped. “Do you mind if I go around the side of your house?”

“I don’t care how you go—just get!”

So I drove up a bank, across rocks, through a flowerbed and around to the front of the house to the main road and drove home watching the rearview mirror all the way.

Had I stopped at the roadblock, perhaps the old Cadillac I was driving would have been off the road before the frame broke in four places and the car fell down on the tires in downtown LaGrange when I was on my way to college.

Had our vehicles passed Georgia’s safety inspection, perhaps the brakes on the VW Beetle I drove after the death of the Caddie would not have failed at a traffic light causing me to jump the sidewalk and drive uphill into someone’s yard to keep from having an accident.

Then there was the tie rod end that broke at highway speed on the truck that replaced the Beetle. I wasn’t a Christian at the time and didn’t know that Jesus had saved my life, but the driver in the oncoming car did. He stopped and said, “Girl, someone up there really loves you. You could have been killed.”

Then there was the car that replaced the truck. It lost one front wheel—the entire wheel—at highway speed when I was taking my grandmother home from shopping. Flames shot up into the air over the roof of the car as it careened down the road on a metal rim. Poor Grandmother, who must have been in her seventies at the time, had to walk home with me—two miles on a dark road along a narrow shoulder.

There is usually a good reason for the roadblocks in our lives. It pays to stop.

Roadblocks direct relationships, too. After my husband’s cancer death, I fell in love with a man 10 years younger than me. We enjoyed being together so much that he hired me to travel around Texas with him selling merchandise. He proofread my second book. I went to his church. He went to my church. I met his family. They loved me. I loved them. When his dad—who was in his eighties—died, he would receive more than one million dollars. We discussed marriage. I told him I had to marry him—he was one of the few men I knew who didn’t say, “ain’t.” We sat down and disclosed everything about our pasts that might prove a roadblock. I told him about the childhood sexual abuse I had endured from my father and explained that as a writer—I might need to go public. That bothered him, but it wasn’t a roadblock. He still wanted to marry me. Then he admitted that he smoked pot regularly. I was shocked. He had never used it around me. That roadblock stopped me. While we were together, I had completed two books which were not yet published.

After we parted at the roadblock and I met my husband Alan and moved to Scotland, the first two books were published. I have now written 35 more and re-written the first two so I could self-publish them. That would never have happened on the road in Texas with the man who—however briefly—flung stars into my night sky and painted sunrises and sunsets in vivid colors. Quite a few of the books including the soon-to-be-published “Grey For Murder” are set in Scotland.

There is usually a good reason for the roadblocks in our lives. It pays to stop.

“For this is God, our God forever and forever, He will be our guide even to death.” Psalm 48:14.

Sometimes He guides with roadblocks.

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