It Was An Omen

On the way down to a particularly important family gathering recently, I spotted a van with the number "666" written in red on the side. Nobody else in the car saw it.
It's probably nothing, I reasoned. It was on the other side of the freeway, and I may have imagined the number on the side.
But a slightly less rational voice in my head screamed, It was the Van of the Beast and you're the only one who saw it! You're going to ride that van to hell someday! (Hell is obviously up north somewhere.)
But that's ridiculous, the reasonable part of me thought. It's just some prank. A kid did this to his van to be tough.
The horror movie begins now! You will be dead in six hours, six minutes, and six seconds.
About a mile later, I saw something else that caught my attention. "Dad! Pull over! There's a huge bag of dog food by the side of the road!" I said excitedly.
He refused. "It's trash," he said. "There's no way a full bag of dog food would have blown out."
But I was still curious, so I pressed the issue. "What if someone had to go up a hill?"
Both my parents burst out laughing at me, full-on belly laughs for about a full minute. "They had to go up this hill?" my dad asked, pointing to a long stretch of perfectly flat road.
I smiled myself, half embarrassed, wondering if I was really qualified to have an opinion about God.

With such an omen as the brain-cell-zapping Van Of The Damned hanging over me, we arrived at the picnic, and...nothing bad happened. I was a bit disappointed, actually, after such an exciting start to the day.
I listened to one of my mother's relatives, a smoker, describe her gluten-free diet. "Mostly salads and fresh vegetables," she said. I walked past her on the back porch later, trying not to inhale the smoke.
Another relation "said the blessing" before everyone ate. I stood there with my eyes open, the only one (yeah, I looked). He asked God to "bless this food to every part of our bodies," and that struck me as strange.
As I started to eat, I thought, Bless this wiener to my wiener*. Bless these buns to my buns. Bless this potato salad to...I got nothing.
In the end, everything was fine. I saw the devil's Beastmobile (proof the antichrist isn't as rich as I thought), I brought home a bag of leftover pickles, and I lived longer than six hours. I wasn't fooled, though; I knew the truth, that the devil had some kind of equipment in that van and had tricked my parents into refusing God's gift of free dog food.

*I am a female and technically don't have one, but all things are possible with God.


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