Lucky

On a bluebird morning in July, 2021, I went for bike ride. Training for my sixth Ironman, I rode thinking about both the gift and the fizz of athletic accomplishment. With the wind at my back and the sun on my face, I turned toward home, grateful for the beauty of this good earth and a hearty dose of endorphins.     

A seventeen-year-old boy driving a Chevy ran a red light and broadsided me. I have no idea how fast he was driving; I was probably doing 22 miles an hour – the wind was at my back. The police report put my body 50 feet from the point of impact.

The collision exploded my lower leg, severed an artery, blew out my ACL, fractured my femur, separated my pelvis, broke a rack of ribs, collapsed a lung, scarred my heart, and damaged the cranial nerves that sync up eyesight. Unconscious and bleeding on the side of the road, I don’t remember anything about the crash. 

The afternoon of the crash, a surgeon operated to save my leg. According to my wife, Sandi, the first thing I asked the doctor the next morning was when I would be able to run again. I was talking, but was confused and delusional. 

The next few days and weeks are blurry fragments and impressions. I had five surgeries in the first 11 days, so some of my confusion was the result of anesthesia and pain medication. The rest was brain trauma, body trauma, and just plain trauma trauma.

A week later, the first conscious-reflective-thought that surfaced was: “I am diminished.” The visits of family and friends are foggy, but I remember thinking that physically, mentally, and emotionally, I was diminished. The healthy athlete in his early 60s was gone. I wasn’t the person that I remembered. I couldn’t think clearly. I wept easily. Somehow, “diminished” pushed through the fog. 

When life is measured by accomplishment—even if it’s how many miles one runs, rides, or swims—it’s disorienting to lose the ability to accomplish anything. Any sense I had of achievement, desirability, identity, or independence was stripped away. I wasn’t fit; I was broken. I wasn’t a leader; I was lost. I wasn’t gifted; I was diminished.

A friend framed it this way:

When your identity is tied up in being an athlete and being a preacher/writer and both are taken away at least for a time – you’re stripped down to what matters. What’s exposed is your vanity. What matters is your family.

If we live long enough, every one of us will eventually be diminished. Aging will erode what we can accomplish. Sickness and disease will shrink what we’re able to do. We’ll try to negotiate, manage, and exercise control. At our best, we’ll adapt to those losses while holding onto memories and gratitude. But I wasn’t ready. My diminishment was sudden. I still felt vibrant. I still was hopeful. I still had things to accomplish. I still thought what I did mattered—or at least gave me a sense purpose and personhood.

However, while I was diminished, I wasn’t dead. It was close, but I was lucky. The car that hit me was small. I was taken to a good trauma hospital. My helmet worked. Help responded quickly to stop the bleeding. My family was by my side. I guess that’s luck, or providence, or evidence of a benevolent God.

Three years later, I’m present as a husband, father, grandfather, and friend. I’m back at work. I can swim, ride, walk, and go to the gym. A pacemaker/defibrillator offers some protection. And, outside of a clumsy little limp and a leg scar that looks like a big shark bite, there’s no external evidence of the accident. That’s my new normal. Again, thanks to luck, access to the best of modern healthcare, and God’s merciful hand.

God’s merciful hand….

What of God’s merciful hand?

What about God in all of this?

In the quiet of a hospital room, in the middle of the night, when fear was real, I prayed simple prayers: “God, help.” “God, thank you.” That was all I could muster. I didn’t have a unique experience of God’s peace. I didn’t turn to scripture. I didn’t recite hymn lyrics. I didn’t hear God’s voice. All I could come up with were those deep longings. Help. Thank you.

I experienced the presence of God in people. As I recovered, I was buoyed by their visits, calls, texts, and stacks and stacks of cards. God’s love—in family, friends, and church community—broke through the concussive drug fog. They were visible expressions of an invisible God. I was embarrassed by the attention, but I’ll be forever grateful for a host of loving and supportive friends.

One of those friends, a retired pastor, came to see me and brought a passage printed on a 3×5 card. We taped it to the hospital bed and I tried to keep it in mind. It read,

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are    mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass         through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.

I’m thankful for those words and that faith tradition.

That said, most of the time I felt like I was sinking. I didn’t exude confidence or traffic in optimism. I was weary, worried, and pain was grinding me down. There were a few weeks in the hospital and a couple months of recovery at home. After a skin graft, I was supposed be “immobile.” As those days blurred together, my mind was mushy, my will was flaccid, and I was exhausted with myself. I often got stuck in my head and didn’t say much. While I wanted to be buoyant, the waters were sweeping over me.

Sandi was buoyant. Sandi was remarkable and full of hope and confidence. She believed that I’d make a full recovery and was so grateful that things weren’t worse. She handled all manner of details: helping me bathe, navigating stairs, tending to bandages, talking to doctors. She got me to appointments, delivered iced tea, tolerated me being silent and sullen, and gave me pep talks. She was an unwavering partner. This crash happened to her as much as it happened to me. Her life, our life together, was changed. I couldn’t be more grateful for her love and partnership—in sickness and in health.

Sandi worried for years about getting a call that I’d been hit by a car. Every time out the door, she’d tell me to be careful. Every time back, she’d whisper a thank you. As I left that morning our ritual was intact. She said, “Be careful.” I said, “I’m only going 40 miles.” And I rode off, leaving my identification bracelet at home.

I was admitted to the emergency room as “John Doe.” The medics saved my life without identification. However, a young hospital chaplain recognized me and offered to help. He searched my cycling jersey, found my phone, and called Sandi. The phone call that she long feared had a gentle soul on the other end. Lucky. God’s merciful hand.

I’ve been told that God spared me because God’s not done with me. “He still has work for you to do.” That oft-repeated trope seems to suggest that God’s hand was active in the events of the day—directing circumstances and fiddling with details. I guess there’s comfort in the confidence that God intervenes in our lives. It holds at bay the fear that life is random, intolerably cruel, and mostly a matter of luck. We cling to the sovereignty of God as a bedrock belief because a universe without divine control and a redemptive plan is terrifying.

But I know that Christians are not specially protected or particularly picked. Christ-followers are murdered, get cancer, are hit by cars, suffer, and die early. I don’t believe God tinkers with events so that we learn a lesson or are seasoned spiritually. Those opportunities for growth may be made available, but that doesn’t mean the tragedy or the details of deliverance came from the hand of God.

We live in the tension of God’s sovereignty and terrible things happening. We live in the mystery of God’s unfolding plan for creation’s salvation and the harsh and horrible realities of human experience.

This past summer, while cycling on another bluebird afternoon, a friend was hit by a car and killed. He was a gentle, serious, thoughtful Christian. The world and the church are diminished without him. I can’t claim God’s intervention in my crash and imagine that the same God didn’t intervene in his. I can’t believe that God is the author of such a meaningless loss. We hold the sovereignty of God and“the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust and the undeserved—all of which eventually come into every lifetime” in tension. Both realities are true.

Richard Rohr describes that tension this way:

Our natural instinct is to try to fix pain, to control it, or even, foolishly, to try to understand it. The ego insists on understanding. That’s why Jesus praises a certain quality even more than love, and he calls it faith. It is the ability to stand in liminal space, to stand on the threshold, to hold the contraries, until we are moved by grace to a much deeper level and a much larger frame, where our private pain is not center stage but a mystery shared with every act of bloodshed and every tear wept since the beginning of time. Our pain is not just our own.

Rather than chalk up particular circumstances to luck or the intervention of God, how can we let that tension shape our living?

Trauma can be transmitted or transmogrified. We can pass along our pain or be formed—even transformed—by it. That’s not to suggest we have things figured out. Neither does it mean that’s there’s reason enough for the mundane hurts and unspeakable horrors. We don’t always get answers or explanations. But even in the uncertainty, we’re free to come alongside one another in love and support. We can be partners in the mystery. That’s been my reality. I experienced the grace of God in those who came alongside me. Without explanation or exhortation, they simply sat with me in the trauma and in the recovery.

The faith tradition that I inherited acknowledges that when the waters rage and we’re swept away, we still belong—body and soul—to our faithful Savior. When we’re stripped of accomplishment and we’re diminished, we still belong to God in Christ. Without answers, without understanding, even when we’re without faith, we still belong.  

Living within that hope seems more honest, more whole, and more human than living within the rigid logic of sovereignty or the fickle winds of luck.