[Nat]

About 10 years ago, my then-husband, my brother and I had gone to see my dad in Amarillo. When we got on the highway, I ended up accidentally headed the wrong way. I didn't realize for a while until I saw a sign showing the miles to some place in Oklahoma. We had driven for a while, so rather than turn back and go the way we'd come, we decided to take the smaller farm to market roads to get us going south again. However, we did have to turn the car around first before we could do this. When I did turn around, I saw for a moment an image of Jesus in my rear-view mirror. At the time I was a pretty staunch atheist. In this image, he was floating above the highway median, looked to be about 10 feet tall and had his hands slightly out at his sides. I knew it was just one of those things you see out of the corner of your eye sort of things - I didn't think Jesus was really floating above the highway median.

Anyway, I mentioned it to my then-husband and described it to him because he tends to be interested in these sorts of things. And we went on our way down the back roads toward the highway we were supposed to be on.

We came to a small town about 15 minutes later where we stopped for gas There was a border collie there with a bent muzzle (I assume from an accident). He was very charming and seemed very much to want to get in somebody's car. He was pretty pathetic - just trying to make friends with anybody. We asked about him inside the gas station and they said they'd never seen him before but he was probably dumped. My ex and I were already beyond our limit with the number of animals we had, and we didn't know really what we should do. We gave the dog some hot dogs from the gas station and drove off. And within 5 minutes we were back with a plan to pick up the dog, bring him back with us to Austin and see if we could find him a home since we couldn't keep him.

He happily jumped in our car when we came back. As we drove out of town, we realized we were in Nazareth, Texas.

When we got back to Austin, we went straight to the emergency vet I used to work for and asked if we could turn in a stray to them. The girl who worked there loved border collies, had a border collie, accepted the dog and said she'd contact the local border collie rescue group who would snap him up.

I always kinda felt like the rearview jesus was a random sign that we were supposed to help the dog in Nazareth, but it's been pointed out to me that you really can't throw a stick without hitting a town in Texas with some sort of biblical name. Still most don't relate directly to jesus and as an atheist I didn't spend much time thinking about the guy.