My Son Is Alive

This past Saturday I was in a car crash that justifies the oft-used phrase "severe". I fractured my spine, my hips, my ribs, my right leg, and required surgery to keep a small part of my spleen in the game.

The young woman with me was hurt much worse than I was though she is conscious and communicating now. The older couple that hit me in the passenger door had some rib and sternum issues; it's my understanding they are out of the hospital now.

But my son was spared. Not a scratch on him. He came to see me in the hospital today and he was brave about it, the way he was brave at the crash site and in the ambulance. He had drawn an ambulance and cut it out for me. He showed which person in the ambulance was me, and him, and the driver, and the EMS person. Then he offered to share a cookie with me.

There are legitimate and explicable laws-of-physics reasons why John was not killed or even injured on Saturday. But will go to my own grave believing the hand of Christ reached down and preserved him. For a greater destiny. For something. Something, at any rate, greater than the need of his tired old father to have a reason to keep living. But for that, too, I am grateful.