...during a thunderstorm.
...with my husband in the passenger seat.
Why? Because Albert tweaked his knee over the weekend and needed to get it checked out. He had a STEM cell injection in that particular knee in late April and his doctor is an hour and fifteen minutes away.
With the Lord's help we arrived. I was a little short tempered but my sanity was intact.
ON the way home, during rush hour traffic on the westbound Texpress lanes of I-635, I witnessed the worst accident I've ever seen. A small SUV that had been zipping and swerving in and out of traffic on the wet four lane toll road didn't notice that traffic had stopped in front of us.
The little black vehicle, still at highway speed, suddenly swerved from the inner lane, across all four lanes of traffic toward the outer one, then applied brakes much too late, and went into a skid.
A few seconds behind I watched the whole episode happen in the lane in front of me. I can still see the violence of the crash in my mind, the SUV hitting the Bobtail gravel truck with such force and speed that the back end of the car flipped up and forward ninety degrees, smashing the roof of the vehicle against the tailgate of the truck. Then it bounced down and to a stop.
I still feel unsettled because, even though I had slowed appropriately for the upcoming traffic jam, I couldn't stop; there was no way or place to safely do so. There was no movement in the car, only the sight of the deployed airbags.
Albert picked up my cell phone and called 911 as I began to cry. Tearful prayers alternated with mumbling about how stupid the SUV was, and how terrible I felt for the driver of the dump truck. Albert gave the dispatcher the approximate location and asked them to get an ambulance there as soon as possible.
Turns out that there were two more wrecks in front of us on that short stretch of toll road. As I inched forward I thought about the driver of the dump truck and anyone who was in the little SUV. Then, as now, I felt so angry with the driver of the vehicle. Maybe I'm being judgmental but I had dodged impatient drivers who were zipping in and out of traffic all day and had resorted to saying nasty things about them, not always under my breath. Yet somehow I feel terrible that this person paid so dearly for such a thoughtless action.
About twenty five minutes and three miles later, just as we were about to clear the backup, an ambulance sped by us on the shoulder. I will probably never know the rest of this story. I don't even know exactly what I'm supposed to pray for, but ultimately I know that nothing happens in God's world by accident. I was there for His reason.
That is the only way I know how to make sense of such a senseless tragedy.
So. Today. Journal about a time when you wanted to throw something at someone, but after prayer realized that God had a lesson for you.
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