I almost died this past Saturday night.
I am serious, I was about 10 feet and a couple of seconds away from eternity. The story goes a little something like this.
I went to a concert with a friend on Saturday (see previous post) in a little town about an hour away. To get there we had to traverse some hilly roads in a back road type route. On the way back home, we were ascending one of these hills when I saw a large coach bus emerge over the top of the hill. It crossed my mind that it I wasn't that confident about the width of the road and it could be bad news if the bus crossed over the center line. This thought put me on the alert and just as my truck and the bus were about to safely cross paths two headlights emerge in my lane, directly in front of me....with a bus on my left. Well, that was unexpected.
30, 20, 10 feet away...I'm not much of a judge of distances but those headlights were close enough, and we were both going fast enough, that there was no time to think about what the best reaction would be. My best reaction was to swerve off the road. Thank God it wasn't a tree lined roadway or I would have just exchanged one head on collision for another. In fact, I actually whipped my vehicle into a pull off area of sorts so not only did me and my friend not have any physical injuries but I didn't have any damage to my truck.
The process was a fuzzy couple of seconds and I still can't put all the pieces of what happened together but it seems as if the car had tried to pass the bus as soon as the car in front of me was out of the way not realizing that I was following behind him.
In the moments following, we sat in the darkness of my truck and I couldn't stop saying thank you to God for sparing our lives. The other driver kept on his way but I hope that he was having the same conversation with his Creator that me and Bill were.
The car up ahead of us stopped to see if we were okay but I cut his journey back to my car short and let him know that we were fine. He then reassured me that the guy who ran me off the road was "an asshole". Now, I try not to make snap character judgements but I agreed with his assessment and we parted ways.
The ride home was filled with talk of how good God is, how short life is, and how important it is to live in the day and not always with thoughts of what tomorrow would bring. If the latter was punishable by jail, the judge would sentence me with 30 to life.
As I write this though, I am thinking that I was in such shock that I don't actually remember what conversations the ride home consisted of, but the points that I just listed were certainly spinning around in my head. And have been since then.
Prior to this episode, beginning with my Grandfather's passing this winter, I had been wrestling with our mortality, the shortness of life, and how much of life is wasted in meaningless humdrum. We freakin' sleep a third of our existences away, which I guess is important to ensure that the other 2/3 of our existence is well lived, but is just crazy to think about. Anyways, this run in with death certainly hammered those thoughts home.
Anyone who knows me is aware that a soapbox is not a piece of furniture that I enjoy spending much time on. However, I would like to go on the record as saying that the the fact that I could very easily be in the ground somewhere right now but am not reaffirms both the graciousness of God and the fact that there can be nothing more important to do while you are alive than to find out what you are alive for.
Life is not something that is to be selfishly consumed, passively endured or even idly wandered through. We are not here for ourselves, we are here for others. I think that Jesus modeled this very clearly.
Thanks to God for the life that he has given us.
Love and Peace, Chris
