Some months ago, I started making plans for Bursting Your Presses – our annual thanksgiving for December 2013, and I told everyone around me that I will plan my trip so that I will be around for it. Little did I know that I was sowing a seed of thanksgiving in advance. I traveled out of the country and returned on the 30th of November, but boarded a flight that was to stop in Abuja before proceeding to Port Harcourt. When we got to Abuja, I called my husband to tell him we were in Nigeria and to let him know when I would get to Port Harcourt, so he could start making his way to the airport.

When I got to Port Harcourt International Airport, I called him through a friend’s phone to know if he was there but he said he was on the way and that there was too much traffic. Meanwhile, I had met a law officer on the day I left at the same airport and he helped me get my luggage and offered to stay with me while I waited for my husband to come. After waiting a good while, I got upset about my husband’s lateness. The officer persuaded me to use his cell phone to reach my husband, but I refused and told him that my husband would come.

I later obliged the officer and took his phone to make the call so he would let me be. At that time, I was the only passenger left at the airport with the porters that helped me with my luggage, apart from the law officer. When I made the call, there was so much noise from my husband’s end that I could barely hear him, all I could make out was, “Oroma, I just had an accident,” and the line went dead. I froze for like two minutes before telling the officer about it. He called back to find out where the accident had happened and my husband told him it was at the airport junction.

We loaded my bags into the officer’s car and in one of the porter’s car and drove to the scene of the accident. The less than five minutes’ drive felt like it we were travelling for an hour because so many thought bombs were exploding in my head.

All I heard myself saying was, “God you know I have been planning this thanksgiving for so long, please don’t let anything ruin it.” I said that till we got to the scene of the accident. A lot of people had gathered and I screened their faces to find my husband. A man then walked up to me and asked if I knew the person involved in the accident. When I answered in the affirmative, he began to narrate what had happened. He had seen my husband driving a slanted car with the two tyres on the passenger side up in the air, and how he struggled to balance the wheels while on top speed; and how he sped past the airport junction in a bid to avoid a bus coming out from the airport without watching. That was how God carried my husband’s car and positioned it properly between two kerbs.

The striking thing was that when I got there and couldn’t see my husband, I almost passed out thinking he was in a bad state. But there he was trying to reposition the car, though he couldn’t. The man who narrated the incident to me said, “Madam, tomorrow go to church and thank God because your husband could have been dead.” I replied, “That’s why I came back.”

I thank God because I know my husband did not drive that car to where it stopped. It was God’s intervention that positioned the car where it was. I give Him all the praise for saving my husband’s life. He is indeed faithful.