A crash course in perspective

This is a story I should have written out a long time ago:

Thursday, November 6, 2008, just three days before I turned eighteen. Torrential rain, flooded streets. The sky was just beginning to darken.

The road I normally drove to my violin teacher's house was closed because of the rain. I felt apprehensive about taking an unfamiliar route during rush hour and in this weather by myself but had no choice. My dad was in Mexico, my sister up north, my mom on her way to church for a wedding rehearsal. Furthermore, my car was having transmission problems and I had to drive my dad's instead.

God, please keep me safe.

It was the same prayer I repeated out of habit almost every time I backed out of my driveway.

Is this the right turn? Yes. Okay, what's next? Here. And I follow this road for while.... Is this where I turn now?

The street sign was too hard to read through the rain. My hands shook slightly as I glanced once more at the slip of paper with my handwritten directions, then looked up at the green light, then at the clearing in traffic. I made the left turn.

Headlights.

They're going to hit me.

I heard the loud crunch of metal and glass. The white pickup truck smashed into the right side of my car, causing it to spin around and into a water-filled ditch.

Rolling down into the ditch I recovered enough sense to brake just before my car got as far as the water.

Next came a muddle of thoughts.

I just crashed.
Am I okay?
This isn't supposed to happen.
The car!
What do I do?
There's glass everywhere.
Phone.
Am I okay?
Have to call mom.

I had just pulled my cell phone out of my pocket when someone appeared at my window.

Are you okay? Do you need help?

He helped me out of the wreckage of my bashed up car and brought me out of the ditch. More people started gathering around.

Are you okay? Do you need to call someone? Do you need a phone? Ah you've got one. Your head's bleeding. Are you sure you're okay?

It's remarkable how long it took to press the two buttons to call my mom when my hands were shaking so much. I told her I'd crashed. She wanted to know where I was.

I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know anything.

I squinted at the street sign and told her the number. At least it had been the correct turn.

You didn't get very far did you? she said.
No.

Was I laughing? Why was I laughing?

Fire trucks appeared. They happened to have been passing by and I was soon taken out of the rain, presented with paperwork and checked over for injuries.

Does anything hurt? Your back? Your neck?
My hands sting a little.

My hands had several tiny cuts from the little pieces of broken safety glass. I held them up awkwardly to keep them from getting blood on my jacket.

Your head's bleeding.
Really? It doesn't hurt at all.

Does your neck hurt?
No. (How many times are you going to ask me that?)
It will tomorrow.

It was a long night but little of the rest is worth relating. Eventually my mom made it through the traffic, then came the police, and finally, after a few more hours of waiting, a tow truck arrived and we could go home.

So it was that the car I was driving was completely totaled and I escaped with a few minor cuts on my hands and face and whiplash. My eighteenth birthday was spent in too much pain to get out of bed, the cuts healed in a few days, I was still picking miniscule pieces of glass out of my hair for a couple weeks, and after several months of chiropractor visits I was physically as fine as I ever was before the accident.

I learned a lot about the sovereignty of God through this incident. There are many little factors that went into the events of that night in such a way that if even one detail had been different I would not have lived to be eighteen. For about a year I thought reliving it over and over again in my mind was a curse. Since then I've realized the opposite is true. It is really a great blessing to be reminded not to take my life for granted and to be reminded to whom I owe it all.