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Sometimes a random event causes something inside you to shift.
Connie Noland, a grandmother from Ringgold, Ga., says she can't shake the memory of a chance encounter in Chattanooga on the afternoon of Thursday, Jan. 19.
She was on her way to pick up her two granddaughters from school in Chattanooga. As she was exiting the freeway at about 3 p.m., her Nissan Altima ran over a piece of debris on the exit ramp.
Within seconds, the tire pressure light on her dash lit up, and then she could hear the distinctive "flub, flub, flub" of a flat tire emanating from under the car.
"I thought, 'Oh dear, that's not good,'" she recalls. "And I started looking for a service station."
She considered trying to make it to her granddaughters' school, but soon realized that she would ruin her wheel rim in the process.
Noland was in a part of the core city where gas stations are few and far between. In fact, she was in a part of the city that suburban folks often only see on the 6 o'clock news. Noland scanned the roadside and pulled into a parking lot - one she later learned served a neighborhood barber shop. She got out of the car to inspect the damage and to call for help on her cellphone.
"Got a spare?" came a voice from a short distance away.
Noland looked up and saw a man coming toward her.
At first she thought the guy was asking for money. She heard him say the word "spare," and thought he was panhandling for spare coins or bills.
"What?" she asked.
"Do you have a spare tire," the man repeated.
"I honestly don't know," Noland said.
Noland says the man, who looked to be in his 40s, asked permission to look in her trunk. After moving around some paint cans he emerged with the spare tire slung over his shoulder.
"He said he is a mechanic, but he can't find a job," Noland recalled. "He said his name is Lee, but that people call him 'Funeral Home.'"
Noland asked, "How'd you get that name?"
"He said, 'I was pretty rough when I was growing up, but I came to Christ,'" Noland recalls.
"'Well, I think God put you right here today,'" she recalls saying. "I didn't know what I was going to do."
Lee went on to explain that he supported himself doing odd jobs and that he was there working on the barber's car when she pulled over.
Noland said she noticed he had a shirt with a phone number scrawled on the back.
"Is that your phone number?" she said.
Lee responded, "No, a lady saw me out working and gave me this because I was cold," Noland remembered.
Looking back on the episode, Noland said, "I stood there and we talked. He's a nice guy. I don't know anything about his past. Don't need to know."
When Lee finished changing the tire, Noland said, she "gave him a little something," and then said goodbye and drove to pick up her granddaughters and on to the Nissan dealership to get her tire fixed.
Now, two weeks later, Noland said she still thinks about - and wonders about - Lee.
"I wish I knew how to reach him and tell him thank you again. He probably doesn't realize what a witness it was to me to God's intervention."
"I praise God for Lee. Oh, to have more good Samaritans like him," she said.
The difference between people's expectations and their experiences is often profound.
Maybe a few more flats would do some good.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timefreepress.com or 423-757-6645.