Like a Rose

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows (Isaiah 53:4, KJV).

It was a year ago this week that our daughter Rachel had an accident. Greg had had a strange uneasiness all day, as he told me over a late lunch, so we’d prayed. We prayed God’s blessing over the house and property, over the upcoming jobs and the one just completed. We prayed for each of our workers in turn, asking God to pour His blessing into their lives; then we prayed the same for each of our four children. We did not happen to pray for their protection, the way we so often do, but we blessed them with intense intentionality.

I mention this because we wonder, in retrospect, if our prayer had any bearing on the outcome of the events that would unfold only minutes later.

After we finished praying, I excused myself and went to the phone. I needed to call Rachel about some plans for the evening. But I couldn’t get an answer. Fifteen minutes later I tried again. This time she picked up. She was gasping and crying. She said she was okay, but that she had been hit by a semi.

The details were filled in for us later: Rachel had left Edmonton after work, heading for a commitment in Wetaskiwin. There was a semi in the fast lane on her left, south of Edmonton on QE2, afternoon rush hour, 4:30 p.m. She was doing about 115 km; the semi was going a little faster. The semi driver couldn’t see the little car she was driving and decided to change lanes. She was hemmed in on the right by traffic, so she accelerated hard, trying to get ahead of him. He caught the left rear of her car as he turned into her lane, knocking her sideways in front of him.

She could see his grill coming straight at her door, driver’s side, and then he hit her, shattering all her windows and plowing her down into the ditch of the grassy median between the northbound and southbound lanes. Her car went airborne then and flipped end over end. She must have landed on the trunk first, because it was annihilated, the air spoiler pushed into the back seat. Then the car bounced right-side-up onto its wheels.

The people who came running didn’t expect her to get out of the vehicle under her own power, but she did. No blood, no broken bones—just some severe bruising from the seat belt, as well as a red mark and bruise on her upper left arm where, as Rachel later said, she had to “hold off the semi.”

I was reminded of how scripture says, “He is a shield unto them that put their trust in him” (Proverbs 30:5). I was so inexpressibly grateful to God for His protection. And yet my emotions stayed strangely detached. I was numb; I couldn’t truly take in what she had been saved from.

The next morning I headed off to my Wednesday commitment at the local farmers’ market. I set my purse down on my chair and began to unload my books and CDs onto my table. Suddenly I was aware of music coming from somewhere. Listening carefully, I finally located the source: it was coming from my purse. My iPhone was playing a song all by itself! I put it to my ear and heard a line from a song I recognized: “Like a rose trampled on the ground . . .”

It brought tears to my eyes. This was a picture of Rachel, a newly blossoming rose, in the freshness and beauty of youth. And so easily she could have been trampled on the ground. The car certainly had been. The reality of what she had so narrowly escaped came rushing home to me, finally connecting with my numb emotions. Tears rolled down my cheeks as the song continued playing. I didn’t even know how it had turned on, and now it played twice, back to back. I stood with my back to the busyness of the mall, stopped trying to unpack my wares, and just let gratitude sweep through me, letting the tears have their way.

Someone touched my shoulder. I turned. It was a young tough who had been doing yard work for me, showing up to claim his cheque, as arranged. He did a double take when he saw my tears. Asked me what was wrong. So I described what my daughter had gone through and how she had come through unscathed.

“That’s God!” he declared firmly. (Not that he claims to be a believer, but he knows that I am.)

After he went on his way, I finished setting up my table and sat down to listen to the song again, Michael W. Smith’s “Above All,” a picture of the sacrifice of Christ. This is the chorus:
.
Crucified, laid behind a stone
He lived to die, rejected and alone
Like a rose, trampled on the ground
He took the fall
And thought of me
Above all

“Like a rose trampled on the ground . . .” It caused me to picture a big, muddy boot heedlessly grinding a tender blossom into the dirt. It caused me to picture what life in its fallen state had very nearly done to our daughter. But Jesus “took the fall” for her.

Perhaps you wonder: How could Jesus take the fall for Rachel in this near-fatality?

Some of my understanding of what was accomplished on the Cross comes from a word study I did several years ago on Isaiah 53. Isaiah prophesied 700 years before Christ’s birth, “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (verse 4). My study of the meaning of the Hebrew words revealed that “griefs” include every malady, anxiety, calamity, disease, and sickness. “Sorrows” include anguish, affliction, and pain.

Since that time I have had a sure confidence that Christ, in His death, broke the power of all these things in our lives. In this case, Rachel’s accident, it was the word calamity that stood front and centre in my mind. Jesus is Lord over every disaster that comes our way, especially when we are yielded to Him. Obviously, this is not to say that calamities don’t sometimes end in severe injury or death: they certainly do. But Jesus’ lordship prevails over every situation, and whether it ends in miraculous deliverance or death, for those who believe God, He commands the circumstances to yield up glory to Him and good to His people. (See Romans 8:28.)

The day of the accident, as we drove to meet Rachel at the hospital, we kept thanking God over and over, so grateful that she was alive and seemingly unhurt. At one point I said, “God, You are so faithful.” But then I decided I didn’t like the sound of that. Even if she had been badly hurt—or worse, God is still faithful. Greg said it best: “Thank You, God, that You saw fit to let Rachel live this time.”

But in spite of all my gratitude, my emotions did not really connect with the reality of it all—until that next morning at the farmers’ market, when that song randomly played—twice—on my phone. And here’s the strange thing: I had never before played a song on that phone. Greg had passed it on to me several months earlier, and although he had several hundred songs on there, in my possession they had lain dormant. 

I discovered later, as I experimented to try to figure out how the music had come on by itself, that two quick taps of the “on” button—even with an inanimate object—will bring up the music program. But it takes the warmth of a human finger on the “pause” button to activate the music. My phone had been in my purse. It’s reasonable that in carrying my purse in from the car with all my other stuff that something jostled twice against exactly the right spot to bring up the program. But only God could have started the music through the exterior of my purse. It reassures me of His involvement in our everyday lives, in the little “coincidences”—and in the living-saving miracles.

Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things . . . (Jeremiah 33:3, KJV).

The Accident That Didn't Happen

Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts (Psalm 95:7-8; Hebrews 3:7, 3:15, 4:7; NIV).

It was a week ago today that Greg and I had such a narrow miss, I still can hardly get my head around it. We had been in the city at a theatre production with most of the family and several others and were returning home. Greg had got sleepy and turned the wheel over to me. By the time the situation unfolded, he was sound asleep in the passenger seat.

I was on Hwy 2A approaching Clover Lawn Hwy (616). There was a cold, light snow blowing. The highway seemed pretty good, but there had been some dicey spots, so I’d been keeping it a little under the speed limit. As I approached 616, I saw that there was a vehicle pulled over on the right, signal light flashing. I knew there was at least one vehicle right behind me, as his lights had been in my mirror; whether there were more than that, I didn’t know and it didn’t matter. I put on my own signal in plenty of time to warn those behind me that I had to turn left, and I began to pump my brake.

The left turn there is not a right angle; you have to turn back somewhat, which means slowing a little more to make the turn, especially when you’re not sure of the traction. I slowed to the point that I was ready to go into the turn. I was aware that no one was going around me, even though there is an extra lane on the right for just this purpose. In retrospect I realized that probably that car being pulled over on the right was crowding that lane a little. So I was very cognisant that I was making traffic come almost to a stop in the middle of the highway, and that is a situation where you know you need to get on with it and out of the way as quickly as possible.

Having slowed sufficiently, I was just at the point of moving my foot from the brake pedal to the gas to accelerate into my turn when ... all I can say is that something deep inside me went “STOP!” Although this was completely unexpected and totally counterintuitive, I stepped firmly on my brake. And a split second later, a big pick-up shot by on my left with a roar of acceleration, probably doing 120 k. Evidently he had approached these several cars with their brake lights on (perhaps my signal light was hidden from him) and decided to pull out and zoom past it all.

I came to a complete stop (or was I stopped already?—I don’t know) in the middle of the highway and sat for some long seconds there, immobilized by a great wave of anger, fear, and gratitude. “Stupid, stupid!” I muttered vehemently. “Stupid! Oh, thank you, God!” (This, of course, roused Greg somewhat.) I took my turn then, realizing that it wasn’t a good place to stay for long, and I drove the last ten minutes homeward with a sick feeling in my stomach. If I had followed common sense, we would have taken that truck broadside. We would have been annihilated.

I lay awake for a long while that night while Greg slept contentedly beside me. He doesn’t waste much time or energy on what might have been, whether good or bad. I lay there with that knot of fear still in my stomach, thinking what our four dear kids might have been dealing with at that very moment.

And I thought about something else: How marvellous it was that I had heard that cry deep in my spirit and yielded to it.

I thought about how in recent years I have worked at cultivating sensitivity to God’s voice—and obedience to it. Jesus said that He only does the things He sees His Father doing; only says what His Father is saying. (Look at all the ways and the many times He expressed this idea in the Book of John: it makes a great study, as well as something to shoot for personally in our relationship with God: John 4:34; 5:17,19,30,36; 7:16; 8:26,28,38,40; 10:31; 12:49,50; 14:10,24,31; 17:8.) With His help, I’ve been listening carefully, yielding to what I hear, and seeing the amazing fruit of that. When this incident shaped up, there wasn’t time to consciously notice the impression and choose to go with it or not: it was a split-second stimulus and response. I’ve often considered that obedience is its own reward. But this takes it to a whole new level. What can I say? I’m grateful. I’m glad to be alive.

Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it” (Isaiah 30:21, NIV).