Two-word prayer…

-But you, Lord, are a shield around me, my glory, the One who lifts my head high. I call out to the Lord, and He answers me from His holy mountain.

–Psalm 3: 3-4

-Turn, Lord, and deliver me; save me because of Your unfailing love.

–Psalm 6: 4

Anyone who has ever been involved in a horrific car accident, one that nearly killed them, will understand what I’m about to say…

There was my life before the accident, and my life after it.

February 24, 2009…commute home on Creek Road, Delran, NJ…around 4pm…

The teenager, a new driver, was fiddling with her iPod.

I heard it before I saw it, a high-pitched squeal. I scanned left, then right, then further out ahead. A car was swerving from one side of the road to the other, just barely managing to stay on the surface, fishtailing toward me at an impossibly high speed. I frantically searched for a driveway, a street, an exit…there was nothing but deep, wide ditches dropping at a precipitous angle. No way off. No way out. I was trapped. Unless this vehicle left the road soon, it was going to hit me.

I had time for a two-word prayer…

“Lord, help.”

A voice said, “Turn the wheel to the right.”

I did, a second before impact.

A terrific explosion of tearing metal and shattered glass, and as I watched the world spin through my warped windshield, in my head ran a slideshow of my life, chronological and full-color, snapshots shuttling through in machine-gun rapidity, then a utility pole.

Full stop.

I was immobile for about thirty seconds, finally roused by an ominous ticking. I ducked my head and scrabbled for my purse and its contents, now scattered all over the floor. Door hinges shrieked in protest as I forced a space wide enough to fall out, headfirst, onto the grass. Then I sprinted flat out across the roadway, convinced my car was about to blow up. I blame a lifetime of action movies.

The rest is a little hazy, until I was loaded into the ambulance. “Where’s your phone?” asked the paramedic. “Who do you want me to call?”

He called my husband and gave him the address to the hospital where we were headed. Then he asked me all kinds of questions. I don’t remember any of them…but I will never forget what he said as they opened the back doors in receiving…

“It’s a miracle you survived.”

For the next week…the deputy who did the interview, the insurance adjuster, my doctor reading the report, the investigator recreating the scene…

“You shouldn’t have lived. That you got out of the car right after it happened, and walked away, is nothing short of a miracle.”

Um, correction…sprinted away.

I’m not all that comfortable under the spotlight; I’m more of a behind-the-scenes kind of girl. It was somewhat embarrassing, the whole “miracle thing.” What did they want me to say? “Uh, but I did live. I did walk/sprint away.” Did they feel I lacked the proper amount of awe and gratitude?

They needn’t have bothered. I didn’t require their assessments to know…to appreciate…how “lucky” I was. I had seen my car in the police hangar…looking exactly like one of those DUI wrecks they park in front of high schools before prom. One of the only parts that wasn’t completely crushed was the area around the driver’s seat; this detail was not lost on me. I had no injuries, either, except a bruise where the steering column had slammed into my knee.

Luck had nothing to do with it. I know Who saved me. And so did everyone else, even if they weren’t there. You can’t miss God’s fingerprints.

Once I’d had a few days to process it all, I revisited those comments. “So,” I mused, “Alright…I shouldn’t have survived the crash. I’ve been given a gift. Another chance. More time, apparently. Am I worthy of that? Am I living the life I’m supposed to be living?”

A tiny cry rushed up from my soul and resounded in my mind…

“No!”

I didn’t question it. I set out to make it right.

That started with Him. With a long-overdue prayer…

“Lord, You gave me my life…again. And now I’m giving it back to You. It was always Yours anyway. I just forgot.”

He immediately sent me to the Word and gave me my marching orders…Matthew 22: 37-39–“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and…Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love God and love people. The rest is just window dressing.

Sixteen years have passed. Sixteen years that, theoretically, I wasn’t supposed to have. I will never stop thanking Him…

and He’ll never stop saving me.

The Lord has saved me so many times in my (almost) sixty years on this earth. Boy, the stories I could tell you…but to borrow the words of John 12:25…”if every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”

Okay, maybe not that many…but there’s a LOT…and I’m not done yet.

More messing up to do on a daily basis…

And more saving grace from the Lord Almighty.