Since You Asked...

Okay, so no one asked. But that's me in the 'photo.' In 1997 I was driving to my job as an English teacher (grades were due!) and was rear-ended by a cement truck. I was stopped for a turn, he was going 50 (I had passed him previously). I was out for half an hour, then woke to paramedics telling me great news: "You won't be going to work today. You've been in an accident."

For some reason that was funny. "All right! Rescue 911!" (I actually said that. You know, Boy Scouts train for years for this sort of thing--now it was my turn.) Soon I was strapped to a board, clamped into a cervical collar, and loaded onto a helicopter. I was sad I couldn't see Houston as we flew to Hermann Hospital (where Dr. Red Duke pioneered the use of helicopters for emergency transport).

Things continued to be funny in various ways, but the pain became unbearable. Long story short, I had--as both my nurse mother and medical student brother suggested--a subdural (Latin for beneath the skull) hematoma (L. for bloody mess). It's visible in the picture--the pool of blood collecting around the skull between 9 and 11 o'clock. You can also see the wavy center line that becomes straight in the smaller apres-surgery film at right (you can also see staples and other hardware I care not to explain here). The hematoma caused increasing numbness and interesting but mild paralysis on my left until surgery, three weeks after the wreck. Two weeks more and I was back at work. (See also the staples in the bottom photo--too bad they were gone by the time I returned to the high school. The kids would have loved that.)

In the end, the whole experience was a blessing. I found it fascinating and even fun in ways (I've always loved being on stage), and I knew it was an adventure I would be talking about for years. I felt sorry for my family and friends--some of whom suffered a terrible fright when the hospital--20 miles and a dozen hospitals away, a place for only the worst trauma cases--called and, thanks to privacy laws, would say only that I had been in an accident "and he's talking." I felt pretty good, all things considered, and was dismissed the next day. (Later, another hospital discovered the hematoma my loved ones had speculated about from day one.)

The greatest thing was realizing in a new way, that even when I was not driving defensively (I never saw it coming--one minute I'm waiting to turn, the next I'm talking to the paramedics), God was watching out for me, defending me and protecting me. Seeing the car in a junk yard later that week was remarkable too. It had been rear-ended, pushed into the next lane and hit head-on by another car doing 50-something, then crumpled underneath the massive cement truck the way bulls climb over each other in a pen. Seeing the car was like whittling on your own coffin. But it was touching too, and all these pictures are actually part of an album I put together. (Here I raise my Ebeneezer, RB.)

The whole thing was special because God just loved me and took care of me and blessed me every sweet day between February 24 and April 1, 1997.

There is no adventure like walking with the Master. Amen? But it means walking through the storm, standing up to enemies and emporers, and carrying that cross up the long road to the Hill of the Skull. And it's sweet fellowship with the Master. Can you imagine that--joining Him, walking by His side? Can you imagine the privilege of suffering with Him? Of being asked to take part in the fellowship of His sufferings? Now that's sweet fellowship.