It was my first road trip by myself. At the age of 30, I had never driven that far, for that amount of time, without anyone else along.

Traveling for my job, I made a 4-day, 12-hour round-trip drive to Minnesota. Arguably, it would not have been the idea of adventure for most, but it was for me. It was my journey, my independence.

My first trip alone

My life had always revolved around the presence of others. I grew up in one house my entire childhood and then married young. My husband and I moved into our first home together. A few years later, we started our family. I had literally gone from my parents’ home to my husband’s. Now I was a mother. I took on the responsibility and constant companionship of small, precious, dependent lives. I had never really been alone. So for me, this trip was about a freedom I had never quite known.

But I wasn’t scared of being alone. I was excited! I was exhilarated! I was ready to take on the world. As I traveled the open road—okay, it was more like I-94 to be exact—I listened to the radio, not another Fischer-Price CD or a Disney soundtrack. I listened to rock and country stations, am talk, even a Christmas CD, despite the October date. I drove for hours before stopping for fuel and was responsible only for my own bathroom schedule—no one else’s. The inner strength I felt at that moment could have led me to reroof a garage or fix a leaking sink, neither of which I knew how to do.

What I didn’t realize during this euphoric moment of domestic freedom was that I wasn’t quite the mighty warrior woman I had thought. It was an illusion I had built up in my own mind because things were going so smoothly. Nothing had gone wrong, and I had begun to attribute that to my own abilities. How dangerously wrong I had been.

My realization that I am never alone

Even though I had felt so overly confident in all I was doing—in reality, I carried a passenger with me. This passenger has been with me my entire life. What if I had gotten lost or had a flat tire? What if I had to confront the threat of danger face to face? Would that have been the moment I would have turned, acknowledged, and finally asked Jesus, my passenger in life, for help? The Bible tells us that “it is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect” (2 Samuel 22:33).