The Car Accident

FEBRUARY 1975

I was called to be a missionary on December 31, 1973, so a month and a half later I went to Lakeland, FL to check out the closest Assemblies of God Bible College. I went to its open house during the second weekend in February with 2 High Schoolers from the church I attended - the church where I was the sole 20+ year older. Manny and Danny were both Hispanic kids who loved to have fun and who had little interest in taking life seriously.

We took turns driving my VW up to Lakeland even though it was only 4 hours away, spending a good part of our journey traveling 88 miles per hour, because that's as fast my car went.

We arrived at South Eastern Bible College on Friday night and stayed until Sunday afternoon.

For our weekend we went to a South Eastern basketball game and a prayer service. Manny, Danny and I had a lot of fun together and even though there was 5 years difference between me and Manny and Danny, they grew on me and I began to enjoy their company and their sense of humor.

On Saturday night I had a strong conviction that I never had before. I felt very strongly that we shouldn't be speeding. I never felt that before or after. I learn the hard way, through tickets, not conviction. But that night I felt it very strongly, so I told Manny and Danny that we were going to go the speed limit on our way home.

I drove the first hour and stopped at a gas station where I made friends with the attendent joking with her and telling her that if the newspapers reported a car accident the next day, it would be us... who would have known?

Manny started driving and I took my Bible and opened it up to read it for the next part of the journey, but grew tired right away and slipped into a deep sleep.

It was light out when I woke up. I was confused wondering why I wasn't at work already. I thought it was Monday and I thought I was in my bed in Opa Locka and there was a strange man in the bed next to me. I turned to look at him; he was excited. "You were in a car accident," is all I understood him to say. I fell back to sleep.

I woke up again with a doctor next to me telling me that I had a head concussion, lung contusions, a broken leg and that I lost a third of my blood. When he left I went back to sleep until sometime later when a nurse woke me up to take me by wheelchair into another room to see my friends where she left me. I looked up and saw a man I never met before, who was apologizing, "I'm sorry." His apology was hollow and timid - he was (as I was told later) an alchoholic, who had been in several previous accidents. The nurse brought me to the other driver thinking he was my friend. I found out later that my friends had already been taken to a Miami hospital only 2 hours away.

Minutes later, the nurse came back into the room and took me back to my room, where somebody brought me the bible I had been reading shortly before the accident. It was a Living Bible completely soaked in dried blood. I was amazed anybody would think I would want to keep it. I slept the rest of the day.

On Monday morning half the town of Clewiston, FL showed up as a Coast Guard helicopter landed in the baseball field to carry me by stretcher to a hostpital in Miami. The crew had to wash the entire helicopter from top to bottom after they dropped me off because one of the cuts in my lung looked like Hepetitus on the XRays.

One week after the accident a Baptist lady walked into my hospital room with my Martin 12 string guitar. She told me a girl at the accident had kicked it into a ditch to steal it, and seeing that the lady walked over grabbed the guitar and drove it down to Miami to give it to me in person. I didn't thank her, cause I was still so out of it. In fact, it was a month before I was ready to get out of the hospital and begin working again with a large cast on my leg and crutches.