So this week's @bloghomework is one that should be really easy for me, so @missy and @rambo here ya go...
People have varying opinions on the notion that you don't die until it's your time. All I can say to that is, if it isn't true explain this:
The year was 1993. The time was 6:30 PM. It was incidentally six years to the MINUTE before the birth of our son.
When my wife and I first got married we were dirt poor. I was a youth pastor and she worked at Wal Mart so we could have the finer things in life, you know health insurance, white bread, peanut butter... life's bare essentials. It was about an hour before our youth group meeting and I was supposed to pick up one of the kids but his plans changed. A total of 3 lives were spared that day because of that.
The place we were living was off a two-lane road that inexplicably had a 55 MPH speed limit. I had seen and almost been involved in rear-end collisions on that road more than once. That Oct 29 (yes, the anniversary just passed) I learned that when you mix a drunk asshole with a chevy truck and put him on that road the odds of an accident increase exponentially. This would be the first of three times that I've been hit by a drunk driver but no one who witnessed the accident thought two people were going to walk away from it.
I saw the truck in my rearview. I was stopped trying to make a left onto the apartment property. I couldn't make the turn and I couldn't get out of the way. I was a sitting duck and that truck was coming up on us FAST. To this day I have no clue how I managed to do it but I actually warned my wife that it was going to happen. "We're going to get hit. Turn your head straight and try to relax."
I instinctively put the car in neutral and took my foot off the brake. It's amazing how fast your mind can work when it thinks the body is about to die if it doesn't. The thought was that if I gave the truck a free-moving object to hit and eliminated most of the resistance the car would absorb less energy and we *might* be OK.
The dude figured out last second what was about to happen and swerved to avoid us. Instead, he slammed us at 75 MPH (based on the police report) and hit us at an angle. The car rolled about 100 feet before spinning out, rolling over THREE TIMES, shattering every window, bending the frame like an accordion, and finally coming to a stop in a ditch. The impact was so severe that the seat backs were permanently bent into a fully reclined position. For all intents and purposes we should have both snapped our necks and died instantly.
No one - and I mean NO ONE expected us to survive. The first on the scene was a state trooper who looked in the car and, upon seeing two alert, awake, and only marginally injured people literally fell on his ass. "Get an ambulance! They're alive!" I heard him yell. We wound up at the ER where I was treated for a banged-up shoulder and a gash above my left eyebrow. My wife received a band aid to cover the cut on her right ring finger. We both had whiplash. That was it. We walked out of the hospital that night, painkillers in hand, but very much alive and surprisingly unhurt.
People, don't ever let anyone tell you different: if it's not your time, you're not going. I'm still here on this rock for a reason. I'm not sure what that reason is but this universe took that kid out of harm's way (nothing in that back seat would have ever survived) and saw to it that I did what I needed to do to minimize the impact and save the other two lives involved in the situation. If you have a better explanation for it, I'm all ears.
