November 11, 2019 was a Monday. That morning I received the kind of phone call every parent dreads. It was my oldest daughter, Hannah. A man driving a van had run a red light at a high rate of speed and struck their car. Hannah was bruised and had minor abrasions but would be okay. Ellen Beth was not. She was transported by ambulance to a local hospital where they discovered her spine was fractured. She was then transferred to a special unit at a Children’s Hospital where she would spend the next two weeks. After returning home, Ellen Beth spent the next three months in a wheelchair. Eventually, by God’s great mercy and grace, she began walking again, then running, then exercising, and then doing jiu-jitsu. Today Ellen Beth is finishing prerequisites for nursing school and working full-time as a Tech in the Observation unit of a local hospital. She has helped save the life of multiple patients, and she has performed CPR and worked bedside on other patients who have not survived. The crash in 2019 changed her life, in ways good and bad. She will always carry the scars of that day, but she is stronger, wiser, and better for having had that experience.
If the driver had struck Hannah and Ellen Beth’s car just a few seconds later, EB’s injuries might have been far worse, and Hannah would almost certainly not have survived. That car crash and everything that happened in it was not an accident. It was hard providence, governed, restrained, and guided by God’s grace. The situation might have been very different, and if one or both girls had not survived, the Lord would still be good and merciful. The crash was bad, but it could have been so much worse. The injury and trauma were great, but not as great as they might have been. We know this is true, and we speak about it often. But our family had a reminder this morning.
Two years to the week after that fateful day, once again on a Monday morning, another teenager in our family, the girls’ younger brother Jack, was driving near our house. This time I was in the car, sitting in the passenger’s seat. We were approaching an intersection just a few blocks from where Jack’s sisters were injured and could easily have died. I don’t think either of us were thinking about that day two years before as we approached the road. Suddenly just ahead of us a car traveling southbound ran a stop sign and began traveling westbound at a high rate of speed. The light was red as he approached the intersection, but he only accelerated as he rocketed into the path of north-south traffic. There was a loud, powerful collision as the speeding sedan struck a small SUV, destroying and immobilizing that vehicle and sending the sedan careening across the intersection, through the adjacent, undeveloped corner lot, and under a tree approximately half a football field length away.
Jack moved to the corner of the intersection and pulled to the curb. I switched on our hazard lights and told him to stay in the van. The driver in the middle of the intersection was screaming, trapped into the smashed car, covered in blood and deflated airbags, alive but in a bad way. As another bystander moved to the driver’s window, I ran across the intersection and into the empty lot to check on the driver of the other car. He was dead. It looked like he had broken his neck.
A police officer was on-scene less than a minute after the collision. The driver of the sedan had been fleeing from law enforcement, although it did not appear the officer was in high speed pursuit. But the speeding driver was desperate to get away. He was ready to risk everything to avoid being detained by the cops, and it cost him his life. I don’t know if the other driver’s injuries were life threatening or not, but the severity of the crash will surely affect him for the rest of whatever remains of his life.
It had been a quiet morning. Sitting in the passenger seat, I was looking down at my phone when the crash happened just ahead of us. Jack and I had been listening to a news podcast just like every other morning, and then everything changed. I spent the rest of the day thinking about the dead body I had seen. I’ve lost count over the years how many there have been, but I wasn’t expecting to see one today. We weren’t thinking about what happened just a few blocks away only two years ago, but when I later texted my wife and daughters to tell them what happened and that we were okay, we obviously thought about it then.
The last thing I tell my girls every morning when they leave to work a shift at the hospital is: Keep your head on a swivel. It is part of our morning liturgy. By now it may be so familiar that they no longer think about it. But I do. Every time I say it to one of them, I wonder if it will be the last time. How many times have I been distracted when driving? How easily do I forget how quickly and unexpectedly and permanently things can change?
The driver who ran a red light and crashed into my daughters walked away uninjured. The driver who ran the red light today died at the scene. My girls eventually recovered from their injuries. I don’t know what will happen to the other driver in the crash today. But today I was reminded of how great God’s mercy has been to my children. After all, that could have been my daughters, or today it might have been Jack. I was reminded of how quickly things can happen when you least expect it. I was reminded that the world is full of reckless people with no regard for the welfare of others, or even for their own. There are all kinds of lessons I could extrapolate as a pastor from today’s experience, but there is no need to do that. I’m sure they are obvious. In the meantime: Keep your head on a swivel. --JME
