i should have been killed

Lead a life worthy of your calling, for you have been called by God. (Ephesians 4:1)

October of 1971. I was I was 22 years old, fresh out of the army and freshly married, and working for Bell Telephone in Houston, TX, taking money out of pay phones. It was a good job for a young man. You got to go everywhere. Everybody, no matter how fancy or ordinary, if they had a business, they had a pay phone.

And my job was taking the money out of them, putting it into a big barrel kind of thing in the back of a step van and taking it back to the central office over on Polk Street in downtown Houston.

It was a sunny afternoon in October, a beautiful day. I was driving along the Gulf Freeway south of Houston coming back from Texas City, just about completely loaded with coins. These were mostly dimes and nickels as phone calls were 10 cents. The truck was really heavy.

All of a sudden, there was an old gray truck in front of me and I swerved to avoid him and went into the median, bouncing end over end. The whole time the accident was happening, I was holding onto the steering wheel thinking, Wow!

When I came to, the step van was lying on the driver’s side, the engine was lying on the driver’s seat and I was standing on the engine. I have no idea how I came to that position. If I had been wearing a seat belt, I would be dead, crushed by the engine.

I jumped up to the top of the van (I had both adrenaline and youth on my side – I was 22) and there was a crowd of people looking at me as if I were Lazarus come back from the dead. No one expected the driver to even be alive, much less mobile.

I leaped down and everyone gathered around me to see if I was a ghost or something.

I had glass in my hand, a small bump on my forehead, a tiny cut on my back at the beltline and the right bellbottom of my pants cut off. That is all.

The truck was demolished and I was barely touched. Everyone wanted me to sit and I didn’t. I was too pumped. Soon a 1965 Ford Country Squire station wagon came up and I said, there’s my mother. A weird looking guy got out who had the same hairdo as my mother. The people around looked at him and then at me and began to encourage me to sit down again. Again I refused.

A tow truck guy (who must have been following me on spec) bandaged my hand and took me to the office.

On the way, my father pulled up beside me in his dark blue Houston Lighting and Power car. The phone company had called my wife who called my mother who got my father on his radio and he came to find me. he figured, how many demolished phone company trucks would be going up the freeway so he didn’t figure it would that hard.

I turned to the tow truck driver and said, there’s my father. He truly didn’t know what to do since I had already seen my mother (who wasn’t). I finally convinced him to pull over (in fact I had to threaten him) and my father came up to the tow truck. Needless to say, the tow truck driver was relieved. My father took me to the hospital.

Forty years ago this next month. I destroyed the truck  I was driving and I was barely hurt.

I have always felt the Lord had a reason for me to survive. I just hope I have not disappointed him.