Close Call

At 1:35 pm yesterday, I sped my car across our busy road toward my driveway. A routine maneuver. I first checked to my left and saw a van beginning a right turn just to the left of me. Reassured that there was no more traffic coming from my left, I looked to the right. Finding that direction clear I gunned my car from the stop sign across toward my driveway. A car that was hidden from my view in the inside lane behind the van on my left nearly smashed into my driver’s side door at 40 mph. I swerved hard right. He swerved hard left. No crash. No damage to either of us. Not even any slowdown in either of our journeys. In a second it was all over and we continued our lives as planned.

How fragile our plans! It could so easily have been a totally different story, that changed my life forever. I could have been lying paralyzed on my back in the street, looking up into the faces of paramedics. Or looking down at the dead body of the other driver. I have focused on the threat of cancer to my life over the past four years. Now the near crash was a wake-up call to slow me down from rushing, to renew my vigilance when driving, to live with that deliberate sweetness that goes with continual appreciation of moments.

The cancer that I thought would forever end my short-term mission trips actually became the vehicle for eight days of ministry in Quito in January. Of twelve public presentations I made, eight were to audiences of cancer patients and their caregivers. God delights to bring good out of evil. I now continue growing in stamina and overall health with no detectable cancer. Much of this improvement comes from the twice weekly intravenous infusions of fifty grams of vitamin C I get at home, under supervision from a medical facility in Wichita, Kansas: www.brightspot.org.

Lesson: continue my health diligence, yes. But remember my ordinary mortality and guard it with unhurried alertness.