1 week after Easter Sunday, on Sunday April 27th, 2003 about 6:30 pm, my son and I were driving home from our recreation land east of where we live. It was a nice day, the sun was shining and there were no other cars on the road. I was thinking to myself that my son and I ought to have our seatbelts on. We usually always do, but occasionally we get lazy. I thought about it some more and I looked around the area I was driving by and I talked myself out of putting them on when I thought about how nice it was, no one was around, we were basically alone and I was driving the speed limit. We will be fine I said to myself.

Just when I thought that, I saw a little red pickup truck coming towards us from about a quarter mile in front of us. I thought to myself, "I am really going to watch this truck, just keep an extra close eye on it". For some reason, seeing as how the seatbelt safety lecture in my head had just finished, and I knew that I had flunked the test within my head, this truck caught my eye when it slightly went off the tar portion of the road. Its passenger side tires went into the small strip of gravel that borders the side of the County Line road splitting the 2 counties of Pine and Carlton in Minnesota. The truck at this point was about 100 to 200 feet in front of us, coming towards us as we were heading towards it at 55 mph.

Now the driver was a very good driver, except for the fact that they had driven off the tar in the first place, because the driver did not jerk the car back onto the tar. The pickup just gradually eased back onto the tar very slowly and easily, just as easily as it drifted off of the road, it drifted back on.� The truck passed me and I passed by it at 55 mph. The pickup headed east, I was going west. A slight thought of "whew" went through my head as I was very relieved that the driver of the red pickup truck handled that ok. Sometimes you just never know.

A good solid 2 to 3 seconds elapsed after the truck passed by us. Then I heard a very loud, "CRACK!" on the windshield of my truck. I thought, "WOAH, what was that?" I looked at the windshield in front of me and saw nothing. But it was surely the sound of a rock hitting my windshield. But I saw no mark or crack or chip in the glass. I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the red truck way behind me now, about 2 football fields away. I looked left and right and there were no homes that I could see, just open fields and woods. I asked my son if he saw where the rock hit, and he said "Yes". He pointed to the lower right side of the windshield and then pointed to a chip in the windshield that was about the size of a nickel.

I then thought to myself, "Now that was odd, --- very odd". I began re-thinking the events out in my head and tried to figure out exactly how this could have just happened. I logically rationalized that the little red pickup truck must have kicked up the rock when it went off the tar. It kicked the rock up so high and so far behind it, that as I drove on, the rock perfectly came down on top of us and I drove right under it and into it. At the speed I was driving and at the point of impact that the rock hit, the rock must have shot back behind the red pickup a good 50 - 100 feet and double that in height. The rock had to stay in the air the entire time it took me to approach the pickup, pass it, and then continue on for the next 2 - 3 seconds at 55mph. It would be neat to see a scientific analysis of the trajectory of the rock shooting out from the tires of the pickup, going up into the air very high and landing on my windshield. I have forgotten all of my Physics lessons I learned in high school, so I won't be adding any drawings here. (smiling). But I hope you can get an idea of what I am talking about. It was rare, it was odd, it was an awakening sign. CRACK! The other possibility of this rock hitting my windshield was that it dropped straight down from heaven. Either way you look at it, miraculous, odd and very rare.

Well after I had rationalized this all out in my head, and verbalized it to my son, I then said to my son, "Mike, let's put our seatbelts on, that was really odd how that happened and it must be some sort of a sign". Mike didn't say a word and agreeing; he reached over and clipped himself in. I also grabbed my seatbelt and clicked myself in. No sooner than we had both clicked our belts on, then 3 wild deer hopped out along the side of the woods into the open grass near the side of the road, causing me to swerve slightly in case they kept coming on their present course. We both looked at each other and said,"WOAH!". "That was close!" We were then very glad we had our seatbelts on.

I remember thinking, "OK Father, I get the message, we should be wearing our seatbelts as things out of my control can affect me, it is the law, and we should wear them. Thank you for pointing that out". But I did not think that the rock hitting the windshield of my truck was "THE" sign I had asked for from God. I thought it was definitely "A sign" due to the oddity of how it happened, but I thought of it as more of a lesson. Plus I need to be a good example for my son which is another lesson in itself. We arrived home and I told my wife about what had just happened.