Sometimes life arranges a moment so perfectly, it’s hard not to believe in higher powers. And that day, I found myself living in one of those moments.

It started simply enough. I had picked up my friend Jenah from work, and we were on our way to get her car from the mechanic. Nothing unusual. Just another afternoon, another errand. But as we pulled into the parking lot, my eyes caught on a figure ahead.

Something about him — the way he moved, the set of his face, the visible scars — stirred a memory so deep it made my heart skip.

Almost without thinking, I muttered to Jenah, “I wonder if that’s him?”

The thought wouldn’t let go. The age matched. The injuries. The scars. I hadn’t seen him in nearly thirteen years. The last time had been in the chaos of flashing lights and rising smoke, when he was just a child — no more than four years old.

How do you even approach someone like that? How do you begin a conversation when the only thing connecting you is a shared tragedy?

I didn’t have an answer, but my feet carried me forward anyway. Slowly, I walked toward him and his family. He looked up, and for a brief second, it felt as if time folded in on itself.

I broke the silence. “Is your name Christian?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“You were in a car fire in Windsor, on 101, when you were five.”

“Yeah.”

“My name is Chris… and I’m one of the ones who pulled you out.”

The air seemed to thicken around us. I couldn’t read his face — maybe surprise, maybe disbelief — and I wasn’t entirely sure what I felt either. Here he was, standing in front of me. The sole survivor of a crash that had seared itself into both our lives in ways neither of us, nor our families, would ever fully understand.

He told me, briefly, about his life since that day — the battles he’d fought, the mountains he’d climbed, the resilience he’d found in himself. I could tell he’d become a warrior, not just in body, but in spirit.

I stopped him mid-sentence. “I have something for you,” I said.

Walking back to my Jeep, I reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the Gold Medal of Valor I’d been awarded for the rescue all those years ago. I handed it to him and said, “You deserve this far more than I ever did. You’ve fought harder battles and shown more courage than I ever will.”

He accepted it quietly, and in that moment I realized something: I had only been its keeper. It was always meant to be his.

I still can’t fully explain what I felt that day. But as I stood there with him and his family, a part of me felt like it had finally come home. And at the same time, a heavy weight I didn’t even realize I’d been carrying lifted from my heart.

So, to whatever higher power might be out there — thank you.
And if there isn’t one… well, life has its own way of astonishing me sometimes.