Two Boys, Booze, a Buick and God

It was August 14, 1966, the weather hot and humid the trees and grass dark green. I was with Andy, my roommate, and some friends at a lounge outside of an eastern Nebraska city. We played shuffleboard, listened to the juke box, drank beer and engaged in irrelevant and irreverent conversation.

It was an evening when conversation and beer flowed. Last call was given and we'd had too much to drink, but this was habit with Andy and I and we had no second thoughts about driving home after drinking too much.

The waitress asked for our glasses I chugged my beer and handed her the glass. One more trip to the bathroom and I'd be ready to go. That's the last I remember about that evening.

Andy had driven, later the friends we were with said his shiny new Buick Electra spewed gravel and tires squealed as we left the parking lot and onto a blacktop road. A couple of minutes later we were traveling at a high rate of speed and passed a car on a curve. He lost control we went off the road and slid approximately 180 feet into the guard railing of a bridge.

When the car hit the bridge Andy was thrown out and wrapped around a guard railing his neck broken. Less than five minutes after we left the lounge he was dead.

The impact ripped the front end of the car off at the windshield and the engine was found three hundred feet from the point of impact. The car fell off the bridge into the shallow water beneath, which was a sewer drainage ditch.

At the initial impact I was not thrown from the car, but when it fell off the bridge and landed the body and chassis separated and I was thrown sixty-five feet, into the creek. They found me face down in the water unconscious.

Sometime after I was told for a car that size to be torn into three separate pieces we probably hit the bridge at a speed of at least 80 mph. To have slid 180 feet and still be going that fast we had to be going 110 to 115 mph, when we left the road.

The police patrolled that road and "happened" to be patrolling it and saw our car hit the bridge, and called for an ambulance. They were at the scene seconds after it happened, as were the people in the car we passed on the curve. They told the police there had been a passenger in the car and the police rushed to the wreckage under the bridge and found me.

I was put on a stretcher and the police and others, who had stopped at the scene, formed two lines up the bank of the creek and passed the stretcher from person to person to the waiting ambulance.

I was rushed to a hospital unconscious and near death. Later, nurses told me when I arrived I was about three or four minutes from dying, because all my ribs were broken had punctured both lungs and I was drowning in my own blood.

Besides my ribs and lungs my left leg was cut through at the knee and only two tendons held it on. I also had a double compound fracture of my right arm and my skull was fractured. The first couple of days I was too critical for clean up surgery and by the time they cleaned me up gangrene had set in my leg.

For the next three months I never fully regained consciousness.

I was in the hospital eight months and operated on twelve times. Miraculously, the gangrene didn't necessitate amputating my leg, but my knee had to be fused and I lost some motion in my right arm.

I was alive, though, and Andy was dead, and I couldn't make sense out of the experience other than a commercial for not drinking and driving. Why was Andy's dead and I was alive?

There was no desire for God in my life, so, for the next fourteen years I tried to handle the trauma through other gods, elicit drugs and alcohol. The results were more trauma.

Then, in April 1980, God's grace showed me the answer. It was Him manifested through His Son Jesus Christ.

I still don't have all the answers to the car wreck. It's always there because I limp and my body is older than my years. I do, though, have assurance knowing there is an all knowing all powerful God, with love for both Andy and me.

It is through His sovereignty I am comforted and I know He understands the accident and the results, and that's enough for me. I also know He chose to draw me to Himself and give me rest for my soul.