surviving a really bad accident

He will cover you with his feathers He will shelter you with his wings. His faithful promises are your armor and protection. (Psalm 91:4)

I just saw a video on Facebook about a pastor and his wife who survived an car accident that was pretty bad.

As I was looking at it, I remembered an major auto accident I had.

It was October of 1971. I had been out of the army for only a couple of months. I was taking money out of pay phones for the telephone company and was driving back to Houston on the Gulf Freeway from Texas City. It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. I was driving 65 mph when all of a sudden an old gray pickup appeared in front of me. He was only going about 40 mph.

I was driving a Step Van overloaded with coins from the pay phones. I slammed on my brakes and tried to miss the pickup. I swerved and clipped his left rear fender and went into the grass median between the freeway lanes.

I went end over end for a couple hundred or so feet. The only thing I can remember of the accident itself was holding on  to the steering wheel while glass flew around and the van turned over and over. I remember thinking Wow!

I came to standing on the engine. It was lying on the ground on the driver’s side. If I had been wearing a seat belt, I would have been dead, trapped under the engine.

I stood looking around for a moment. Then I leaped out of the van and stood on the top (the passenger side) looking at the crowd of people who had gathered. I suppose the adrenaline was going which helped me leap that far.

I got down from the van and several people tried to make me sit down but I was too pumped. I looked at the van and realized that I had totaled it, that there was little of it left, that for all practical purposes I should be dead.

It seemed that the only injuries I had suffered were a cut on the palm of my right hand, a small knot on my forehead, a light cut at my beltline in the back and the right lower pant leg had been cut off. A tow truck driver was there and helped to bandage my hand, which was bleeding profusely.

As I was talking, a Ford Country Squire pulled up and I told those around, there’s my mother. Since she drove a car just like that and it looked like her, it was logical. However, it turned out to be a tall thin man with a hairstyle just like hers. Everyone looked at me and tried to get me to sit down again. But again, I shrugged them off.

A highway patrolman gave me a ticket and I left. The tow truck operator that bandaged my hand took the truck back into Houston and I rode with him.

As we were entering Houston, my father pulled up beside the tow truck. Some nitwit had called Ella and told her I was in a bad accident but didn’t know anything else. She frantically called my mother, who got hold of an operator at Houston Lighting and Power who called my father on his car radio. He figured out where I would be and found me.

As the tow truck driver and I were driving along the freeway, I saw Dad. I said, there’s my father. You could see the tow truck driver deliberating. I had already seen my mother who had turned out to be a tall skinny guy, now I saw my father. I tried to get him to stop but he plainly didn’t know what to do. He probably figured I was unbalanced.

Finally I told him to stop or I would hurt him. He did and it really was, to his relief, my father.

Dad and I followed the tow truck into the telephone company shop and then to the doctor. He also called his dispatcher who told my mother who told my wife what was happening.

As it turned out, I had glass in my hand, which required some stitches, and a few days later penicillin for the infection which set in. Nothing else was bad. I had escaped a major accident almost unscathed in which I had totaled a Step Van.

It was a bad accident, one in which I should have been killed.

But I wasn’t. He sheltered me. He covered me with his armor and protection. Why he allowed me to be spared I do not know. And why he allowed others that day to be killed I do not know.

Last year when we were driving up here every week from central Missouri, there was a blizzard. We drove for over 50 miles in raging snow at no more than 15-20 mph. It was frightening. We saw more than 50 cars in the median along with ten tractor trailer rigs.

We made it fine. But that same weekend, the pastor of a neighboring church flipped his car and was killed.

Why did he help me but not the other guy? Both of us were pastors, both of us were doing his work, yet one died and the other (me) didn’t.

I have no answer. But when I think about that accident I had in 1971, I realize that God had a purpose for me. I do not believe it was random in nature.

What it was I do not know. I just hope and pray that I had lived up to what he wanted. But I will ever praise him and serve him.