February 24th, 2020 will be a day that I will never forget.
It was the day I was involved in a terrible car accident and could have easily died.
At 7:30 am in the morning driving out I-20 East in Atlanta, it was cold, rainy, with gray skies. I was side swiped by a truck, knocked unconscious as my car spun out of control, flipped over, and slid 10 feet up the side of the hill into a tree, pinning me inside the car. I was unconscious in the car, upside down for about 20 minutes bleeding from my head before the first responders pulled me out.
I woke up an hour later at Grady Hospital with my precious wife, Adrienne and my friend and boss, Josh at my bedside. I had sustained a bad concussion, a cut on my head that needed stitches, and lots of bruising on the left side of my body. After doing all of the scans to make sure my brain was okay and checking for any broken bones or pierced organs, they let me go home around 1 pm that same day.
Post accident it took me a long time to fully comprehend and process that I almost died in a terrible car accident. This sort of things happens to other people, not me. I’ve been healing from this accident in every way since then. Physically, I am fine. It’s the emotional part that will always be there.
One of the strongest emotions that came up after the accident during my time with God and in counseling was the utter lack of control over anything that happened. It was the feeling of being completely vulnerable and exposed laying upside down in the car, unconscious, bleeding from my head.
I felt alone. Exposed. Betrayed. Afraid. Those emotions are real and true.
Being afraid makes us try and control life. Control pops ups when fear is present. What was the root of fear for me? That I would be left alone, that my wife would have lost her husband and that my kids would have lost their dad.
As I started coming around in the hospital room and after asking about 25 times if the kids were okay, I sensed something. I sensed the presence of Christ in a very real and substantive way. I can’t explain it. I sense it the same as I write these words and reflect over the accident. I sensed the hands of the Abba Father resting on my shoulders telling me it’s going to be okay.
No where in the scriptures does it say that tragedy won’t happen. No where does it say that car accidents won’t happen. The promise is that God says that through the present of his incarnated son that he will never leaves us nor forsake us.
The opposite of fear is trusting in this God that gives us this promise of never leaving us. Jesus says it like this as he’s addressing his disciples before he’s about to leave them; “I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.”
I can identity with Jesus as a human as he cried out on the cross to the Father, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The writer of Hebrews says it like this; “For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.”
I love a God that can relate to the feelings of being alone, exposed, betrayed, and afraid. This is one of the reasons I love and have learned and continue to learn from theology that’s written out of oppression by the black and brown church. There is an emphasis on Jesus as a human feeling everything we have felt. He enters into the tears, the worry, the doubt, the reality of almost dying and somehow he’s mysteriously there as a presence of comfort.
Yes, of course, like Joseph’s story at the end of Genesis, good has come from all of this. But that’s not the point right now. The point for me right now is living in this reality that Christ was there as I was being tossed around in the car. Christ was there was there as I lay upside down in the car bleeding unconscious. Christ was there as the first responders pulled me out of the car. Christ was there as I was rushed to Grady Hospital in the ambulance. Christ was there as I slowly woke up laying on the hospital bed.
As difficult as it was, I sensed the nearness of Christ in it all, realizing, He’s in the accidents of life and living into the reality that we control absolutely nothing.
Christ is present and that is enough.