How Healed Do You Want to Be?
Chapter One: Crash
Copyright, 2009, Ampelon Publishing
All Rights Reserved
“And… hey, hey, hey! … Let’s be careful out there.”
(“Sgt. Esterhaus” of Hill Street Blues)
“The cords of death entangled me;
the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
the snares of death confronted me.
In my distress I called to the LORD;
I cried to my God for help.
From his temple he heard my voice;
My cry came before him, into his ears.”
Psalm 18: 4 —6 (New International Version)
The wipers of our family minivan cycled furiously as the winter rain came down in sheets. Robin gripped the wheel tightly as she peered through the windshield at the storm-drenched road. She had made this part of the trip home from our children’s school many times before. The gentle grade rose up through the old ranch land to the top of the hill where eight-thousand new homes were under construction.
Andrew, our teenage son, sat next to his mom in the front passenger seat while the stereo competed with the thrumming rain. Behind him our three-year-old daughter was buckled securely into her child safety seat. It had been raining hard for several days and the roads were slick and treacherous. Behind the wheel, Robin was still feeling a little badly about having to refuse to include one of the neighbor kids in that day’s ride home from school. The little girl was without her car seat, however, and that was one rule Robin would not break. As she was thinking about these things, she didn’t notice the pickup truck coming from the opposite direction as it gained speed, moving down the hill away from the new construction area. She never even saw it slide sideways across the four-lane road and directly into her path, hydroplaning out of control.
In only a second it was over—the mangled vehicles wrapped around each other, steam hissing from the wreckage and dissipating into the falling rain. In the pickup truck, the passenger was already dead on the scene and the driver badly injured. In our family’s vehicle, the range of injury was unbelievably broad. Andrew had some relatively minor hurts, while Jeanne Ann had been totally spared. Robin’s injuries, however, were devastating.
At the time of the impact, I was busy at home. A friend had come to show me the new business cards and stationery she had designed for our new church start-up. How could I have ever guessed that as we sat there imagining the future, half of my family was enroute to the local trauma center? I would know nothing of this until I happened to check my phone messages. The unexpected one from Mission Hospital nearly took my breath away. The sober voice on the recording urged me to come right away—my family had been in a terrible accident.
I prayed as I drove, trying my best to imagine what I would find when I got to my destination. Whatever it was, I knew our lives would never be the same.
*****
