His Goodness Is Running After Me

Totaled.

Who likes hearing that word? No one.

My sister, in a wreck last month, had to hear it from her insurance company. 

A friend of mine was in a wreck, and heard the same.

And a friend of yours, I’ll wager, was in one, too. “It’s totaled.”

After our wreck, I kinda wished we could hear it. 

Cause that would’ve meant there’d be some money to help replace it. But, alas, with our old habit of only carrying liability insurance on our oldest cars––I supposed we’ve saved a lot over the years––this one came back to bite us. Hindsight is 20/20.

Our car was totaled, just not in the insurance sense of the word. No way it was fixable for less than its 17 year old self was worth. 

No one was hurt. That’s the most important part. Both Enoch and his best friend, as well as the driver from the other car, were all fine. It was sort of a freak accident where the legal blame––or at least a majority portion of it––fell on our side, but where I could clearly see I couldn’t really blame our boys all that much, either. In reality, the person with the most blame was probably a third guy who had left a space in front of his stopped vehicle for our boys to come through into the center turning lane. He looked over his shoulder and waved them the “all-clear, come on through.” 

Only to have them barely get their nose into the center lane before wham! Someone at full speed eager for the left turn lane up ahead.

How fast was he going? Who knows. And what Mr. Wavethru thinking? Or looking at? Naught but a whole lot of neither, I guess.

Perhaps (my original assumption, but remember I wasn’t there) our car hadn’t crept out slowly enough? But what are you supposed to think when you’ve got a friendly face waving you through?

Life changes in a flash. 

Life changes in a crash. 

And we’re blessed. For much, much more could have been changed. Loss of much more than a vehicle. How torturous it must be to have the same kinds of trivial explanations of exactly “how” it came about (this turn, that wave, this what-I-originally-assumed-inconsequential detail…) all juxtaposed to ever-widening ripples of tremendous consequence. I can’t imagine.

So we’re grateful. 

But, good-bye, wonderful 2002 Accord, we’re so sad to lose you after only a year. 

100,000 had just turned over the week of the accident. Barely half the mileage of most of those cars that age. Really the only complaint Enoch had ever had about using it was wishing it was a mini-van. He’s discipling four refugee boys from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and whenever he brings them to church or youth group, they fill the car. No room for another curious guest. Or one of his siblings. Our family SUV is a poor fit because––and we may lend it to him for the odd cargo trip––it’s almost always needed by, well, the family. The Accord was such a blessing car. It benefitted lots of Envision folks, and we’ll always be extremely grateful to the friends who gave it to us.

But the story didn’t end with the crash. The very moment my phone had rung––Enoch with the bad news––I was putting the finishing touches on a return email to some new friends. I’d met them at the beginning of last month while preaching at their Port Chester, NY church. (It was the church Tammy and I had attended during our year at Alliance Theological Seminary, the year that somewhere a 2002 white and tan Honda Accord had rolled off an assembly line and been sold as new.) 

Anyway, the story in my sermon of that car coming to us had really blessed them, they said. They loved hearing how the Lord had led me to purchase a one-way flight to a conference, and how he’d provided that car only a day before my trip, a gift from friends awaiting my arrival in Texas. I would have no need of a return ticket as I now had something to drive back. Now a year later these new friends were asking: “We also have an old Honda our family no longer uses. Do you know anyone there with Envision Atlanta who could use a free vehicle?”

An accident is a horrible way to lose a possession as valuable as a car (not to mention the horror of losing far worse, as many have). We wish we could have been spared its loss.

But God’s faithfulness, to be moving on our behalf before we’d even experienced the loss…We don’t deserve it.

Yet here again He provides for us from his bounty. We had to endure hardly a month of extra drop-offs and pick-ups and vehicle scheduling snafus. And already the new Honda is here. (Funnily, as a 2003, it also was manufactured at some point during that one year of seminary when we attended that NY church.) Our new friend even amazed us further by offering to drive it down to us. After a quick tour of Clarkston, I dropped him off at the train station for his 17-hour ride home. So, once again, Enoch and his boys have some wheels when they need them. And there’s room for a sibling, or a guest. Or both. For this time the Honda is a mini-van. 

Praise you, Lord.