It gives me cause to think. I decided yesterday afternoon that I needed to honor my father, more so than the usual card and phone call, so just after the nursing home service, I drove home to say hello and give him his gift. It was a time I needed as much as he did I think. What makes this particular trip more noteworthy than most is what happened while I was driving home…

I was scanning the radio stations, mostly to keep myself occupied and fully alert, and I glanced down at the display on the radio and looked back to the road. What I saw was somewhat surprising, for about 100 to 150 yards in front of me, a small SUV was 15 feet in the air, spinning in an arc across the grassy median of the Interstate. I stopped of course, but there was little I could do. I had not seen what caused the accident, and someone was already on their cell phone. A highway patrolman stopped just a minute after I did, and there were several other vehicles that had seen the accident. The vehicle had thrown the driver, a female in her late twenties, who was lying in the grass. Two passengers, a man and a woman were in the backseat. I think they were wearing their seat belts, which would explain why they had remained in the vehicle. The SUV was built like a small jeep and had the top down. I prayed for them and all those involved, but since I could do nothing, and I did not want to get in the way, I got in my car drove the rest of the way home.

It is unsettling emotionally to have been so close to an accident with such damaging consequences. When I left, all three passengers were alive. I only hope that they survived. I am reminded of just how frail is the human life. Jonathan Edwards once spoke of this very thing, exhorting the people to realize just how dangerously their life hangs by the thread of God’s grace, and what little holds us to this earth. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God so moved the listeners that people wept openly and many were saved.

How does a damned man survive in this kind of world? Without the surety of God’s grace and promise of protection, I would undoubtedly be most miserable. Yet this circumstance causes me to see the depth of my ingratitude, for in the face of such graphic visualization of the frailty life, I still find it difficult to share with men the only thing that stands between them and an unthinkably horrific hell.