We’ve all heard it said: “Don’t drive faster than your guardian angel can fly.” But perhaps what we really need to understand is that sometimes our guardian angels speak in whispers – in premonitions, in sudden vigilance, in that inexplicable voice that tells us to slow down when every instinct says to speed up.

When I was 16, working my first summer job, I had no idea that journalism was in my future. I certainly didn’t know that one August night would teach me the most important lesson about the difference between exploiting someone’s worst moment and seeking truth with compassion.

That night, driving home after my shift, something felt wrong as I approached the climb up old Airport Hill. A sense of doom washed over me – so overwhelming that instead of lead-footing up the hill as usual, I shut off the cruise control, turned down the radio, and became hypervigilant, scanning for headlights in the opposite lane. I can’t explain why. Some instinct just whispered: pay attention.

I remember focusing on bright lights moving quickly across the highway, thinking with strange clarity: that car is going to hit me. There wasn’t much I could do. I slowed to 55 mph, gripped the wheel with both hands, and felt the impact.

The geography of that spot saved my life. Next to Van Mark’s red barn, I knew I had to fight the wheel and veer east off the roadway – toward the vacant ground scattered with failed wheat rows – because west meant a steep drop-off. Somehow, despite the head-on collision that dropped my front axle and left a scar across highway 85 that remained visible for years, I managed to bring the car to rest upright in a bare patch of earth.

When the car finally stopped, shock set in. I didn’t know what hurt or what had happened. But the worst moment came when I reached for the door handle. All the glass from my driver’s side window lay embedded in my thighs, driven deeper with every bump across the wheat strips. The door wouldn’t budge. I hit the unlock button, rammed it with my shoulder – nothing. Confused and trapped, I finally climbed over the center console to escape.

Outside, in pitch darkness, emergency lights approached from the north. Someone had seen the accident. Alex Irons pulled up first, handing me his cell phone to call my mom. She was at work in Yoder and could see the glow of emergency lights from my accident site. Another responder went to check on the other vehicle.

I walked away that night.

The next morning, for insurance purposes, we visited Dr. Church, my regular physician since moving to Wyoming. He looked exhausted. When my mom commented on his rough appearance, he chuckled grimly – he’d been the emergency room doctor on call and had dealt with a terrible “one vehicle” accident on Highway 85.

“Here’s the other half of that accident,” Mom said.

Dr. Church stared at me in disbelief. “It can’t be. It was only one car.” He was shocked I was upright, breathing, essentially unchanged from my last visit. The collision that had seemed so minor to me had apparently been devastating enough that the emergency room doctor assumed only one vehicle could have been involved.

A few days later, I returned to the accident scene. Lying in the grass was my passenger side mirror – from the side that hadn’t been touched, that looked brand new. It had somehow fallen off from impact alone.

“Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”

That phrase would frame how I approached life from that moment forward. You never know what’s bearing down on you. Sometimes those approaching objects bring wonder; sometimes they bring devastation. But they’re always closer than they appear.

I’ll never forget Randy, the man who hit me. He’d been moving from Colorado to northern Wyoming, making one of his final trips that night. His vehicle was packed with belongings, including a mini-fridge filled with wine bottles – a detail that would later matter more than anyone initially understood.

The morning after my accident, the front page of the Torrington Telegram broke my heart. A reporter had been monitoring the police scanner and arrived at the scene before emergency crews. The image showed Randy lying beside his mangled vehicle, personal belongings scattered across the grass, a man captured in his moment of greatest agony.

The caption identified Randy as drunk, noting “the smell of alcohol” at the scene. But that mini-fridge had shattered on impact, wine bottles breaking and spilling their contents. Randy’s blood alcohol was zero. He hadn’t been drinking – he’d simply fallen asleep at the wheel after hours of moving.

Seeing that front-page photo planted something in me that would define my approach to journalism years before I knew that’s what I’d become: I would never chase emergency crews. I would never exploit someone’s worst day for a story. There’s a difference between being a reporter and being a journalist.

About a week after the accident, I realized I needed closure. I had to know if Randy was okay, if he would recover. The not knowing was consuming me.

When I walked into his hospital room in Scottsbluff, where he’d been transferred, his first words were: “Please don’t sue me.”

The antiseptic smell of the hospital room mixed with something indefinable – fear, maybe, or exhaustion. Randy’s voice was hoarse, vulnerable. I told him I just wanted to make sure he was alive, that we’d both made it through.

He explained his injuries: shattered pelvis, fractured hip, a list that seemed to go on forever. We talked for a while in that sterile room, two people bound together by a moment that had changed everything. Randy wasn’t drunk. He hadn’t had a drink in months. He was just a tired man moving his life from one place to another who fell asleep at the wheel and altered the trajectory of mine forever.

That passenger mirror, fallen from the untouched side of my car, became my talisman. Sometimes the most important truths come from the side that appears undamaged. Sometimes what seems furthest away – disaster, revelation, the moment that defines who we’ll become – is actually bearing down on us faster than we can imagine.

The scar my axle left on highway 85 faded over the years, but what I learned that night never did: Guardian angels don’t always fly alongside us. Sometimes they speak through premonition, through the wisdom to slow down when everything tells us to speed up. And sometimes they work through our choice to seek understanding rather than blame, to choose compassion over anger, to see the person behind the accident rather than the story behind the trauma.

In that hospital room with Randy, I learned that the most important stories aren’t always the ones that make the front page. They’re the ones that remind us we’re all just trying to make it home safely, and sometimes we need each other’s forgiveness to get there.