When I was about ten
years of age, my mother and I traveled by car to Iowa from Independence,
Missouri. We traveled north on Highway
291, which was then a two-lane highway.
We were going to visit friends of her, and she had given me a camera, so
I was entertained taking snapshots of cows as we traveled northward.
At one point she saw a
semi barreling towards us, and it looked like it was taking up its lane and
part of ours as well. She inched over to
give it more room. In the process, she
hit a chuckhole on the side of the road.
Our car spun 180 degrees, and my side of the car slammed into the
semi. The force of the impact spun our
car 360 degrees, and my side of the car slammed into a second semi following
the first one. My side of the car just
disappeared. I was thrown about fifteen
or twenty feet onto the pavement. The
doors of the car on my side were gone.
The frame was gone. The seats
were gone. My mother’s side of the car
looked pristine, with clothes hanging behind her seat neatly arranged, not a
dress out of place.
When the state patrol
and ambulance arrived, I was taken to the emergency room because I was
crying. There wasn’t a bruise on me, but
they feared there might be internal injuries, and after all, I was crying. My mother explained, “She’s crying because
her camera is broken!” True. There was absolutely nothing wrong with me.
At the time, being
ten, I thought nothing of it. Years
later, working as a nurse in the emergency room, I saw the deadly result of MVAs
where passengers were thrown from vehicles.
It was never a pretty picture, and I thought back to my experience:
being hit twice, having the car pulverized, being thrown onto the pavement, and
not having a scratch or bruise anywhere on my body. I stood once to share the first time God had
spared my life, and the Spirit whispered to me, “That wasn’t the first time…”
And if you want to hear
that testimony, you’ll have to ask me!
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