Away with Words: In Pursuit of Authenticity

Happy Father's Day, dad

This Father's Day is especially significant to my brothers and me because our dad nearly missed the celebration. Last August he survived a shoulda-been-fatal motorcycle wreck. Read the testimony below, originally written August 16, 2004.

______________________________________________

Two weeks ago, August 4, 2004, my dad miraculously survived a near fatal motorcycle accident.

He and two minister friends of ours, Richard and Juan Galloway of New York City Relief, departed at 5 am for Sturgis, the annual Harley Davidson festival in South Dakota that draws half a million people every year. At approximately 3 pm, cruising through Ohio at roughly 75 mph, my dad wiped out on a rain slicked highway. His brakes locked, causing the motorcycle to fishtail out of control. After tumbling half a dozen times (into the left lane of a three lane highway) he sat up, realized the cars behind him had stopped (rather than run him over), got up and walked to the median in the middle of the road. A woman appeared and asked if she could pray for him. “God, I don’t know who this man is,” she said, “but you have a plan for his life.” The miracle is that about half an hour before the accident, my dad put on a full-faced helmet. I can honestly say I remember him wearing one of those helmets once in the last ten (or more) years. But he decided that for a 5,000 mile round-trip ride to the Dakotas, he would bring the helmet to protect his face while driving in the rain. As he lay in the ambulance, a paramedic brought him his helmet and said, “If you weren’t wearing this, we’d be shoveling your head off the pavement.” With his neck braced and stabilized on a stretcher, the EMTs raced him to an emergency room expecting he’d be admitted with serious injuries and broken bones. But after a battery of x-rays, cat scans, and blood work, the doctors concluded that he had no internal injuries or broken bones and discharged him that same night. “It’s a miracle,” they decided. To cap off the miracle, a battered, but definitely not broken Pastor Rick dedicated his second grandson Seth James at Sunday service on August 15, less than two weeks into his recovery! “Thanks be to God who always leads us into triumph.” And thanks too to Richard and Juan Galloway for staying with him that first night and to Mike and Linda Mowery for nursing his recovery.

______________________________________________

posted by Jeremy Del Rio @ 6/19/2005 11:50:00 PM