It Only Takes a Moment

I came home from a Super Bowl party Sunday evening to a voice mail message from my mom. She said that she and Dad had been in a car accident earlier that evening. The car was totaled and Dad was in the hospital. I immediately called Mom’s cell, but it went straight to voicemail. My sister was the next person I called. She had also just gotten home and hadn’t heard anything yet. She called one family member and I called another trying to get some kind of information about what was going on. It took about 20 minutes and about 10 phone calls, but we eventually got the story. Mom made it through with only bruises from the seat belt, but Dad had several cracked ribs and his scapula (shoulder blade) was broken in two places.

An event like this makes me even more contemplative than usual. It’s so strange to find out that while I was having a good time at a party, people that I love were experiencing something horrendous. Somehow it seems that we should just be able to know or sense when something like that happens to those we care about.

It seems incomprehensible to me that we can be going about our lives with our dreams and plans and in one moment everything changes. A plane crash, a heart attack or a car accident alters forever the course of a life, a family, a nation. These things happen all the time to people all over the world but it doesn’t really mean that much until it happens to you.

The only thing that keeps me sane and gives me hope in the seeming randomness and chaos of it all is my faith that there is a plan and it isn’t all random.

As I said earlier, this kind of thing makes me even more contemplative than normal.

My dad is ok, and life hasn’t been altered too much this time, but I know that it’s only because he was protected. If he had driven through that intersection just a moment earlier. If that car on the freeway hadn’t cut him off, causing him to slow down just a bit. If he’d driven just a little faster, the outcome could have much different. I’m just very thankful that it wasn’t.


For God guards the course of the just and protects the way of his faithful ones.