A Balancing Act 
by Sara Chana O’Campo, age 12, from OR

One weekend, long before I was born, my two older sisters, Miriam and Esther, took a day-long drive with my mom to Puyallup, Washington to see a Breyer Horse Show. Breyer horses are lovely model horses that my sisters and I collect.

When my mom and sisters left the motel where they were staying, there was a lot of hassle to get everything packed up and into the pick-up truck. My mom was pretty frazzled, and left her purse, which held her credit cards, money, and driver’s license, on the back bumper of the truck, by the tailgate. The bumper was only about four inches wide, so the side of the purse actually hung over the edge of the bumper!

My mom did not notice that she’d left her purse there. She got into the truck and drove away. She drove down the street, turned several corners, and roared up an entry ramp onto the freeway. They drove along, and as they went people honked and waved, trying to tell my mom about her purse, but she didn’t understand what they were trying to tell her. They had gone about a hundred miles and were still in Washington when my mom noticed that she needed to buy gas soon. It was then that she realized that her purse wasn’t next to her in the seat where it always was! She asked my sisters if it was in the back seat with them.

It wasn’t.

Then she remembered setting it on the back bumper of the truck. She remembered all of the people honking and waving. And then she realized that no one had honked or waved in over an hour. That had to mean her purse had fallen off a long time ago!

Just when things looked so bleak and my mom was panicking, a car went by and the people in it waved and honked. The purse was still there! My mom found an exit, and driving as carefully as possible, made her way to a place where she could pull over and stop. She got out and hurried to the back of the truck, and there was her purse sitting on the bumper exactly where she had left it!

As my mom set off to buy gas she thought, “Wow! This is total Hashgasha Pratis (Divine Providence)!” How could her purse with all of her valuables not have fallen off a bumper that was barely wide enough for it to balance on? Hashem (G-d) must have kept it in place! Huge trucks had blown past them on the interstate, making tons of wind, which should have made the purse fall off. But Hashem held the bag in place.

Relate this to the way your life feels sometimes. When your life is unstable you feel like you are about to stumble and fall, but Hashem keeps you in place. He keeps you from falling. He makes sure that our lives, like the purse, balance perfectly.