I had a 10 AM brunch date with a good friend of mine who recently moved back to Connecticut after a couple years of living 1000+ miles away from me. I left my house a bit early, as I have the “to be on time is to be late” mentality drilled into my head from my high school choir director. I got there 10 minutes early and sat in my car, deciding to wait for my friend there. My parking spot was facing the main road, and I kind of zoned out, watching the cars fly down the street, way above the speed limit. That’s when I witnessed something that now, I would much like to erase from my mind. A car pulled out of a driveway directly across the street from me, and onto the main drag. Unfortunately, he wasn’t looking, and happened to hit a car flying down that main road. They had a T-Bone collision. At a solid 45 mph. I saw everything unfold right in front of me. RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. The car get jolted a good 4 feet in the air upon impact. Smoke rising. Noise after noise, screech after screech. I could almost feel it from my car. I immediately went into shock. What if my friend was in that car? What if my friend wouldn’t make it out of this alive? I was too traumatized to cry or scream or pray. I was frozen in shock. I watched all the surrounding store owners call 911, come out of their stores with hatchets and fire extinguishers. I watched them extricate a woman from her car and put out the smoke. I watched EMT’s perform CPR on this woman who was severely injured and clearly unconscious, for multiple minutes. They weren’t able to get her conscious again. After getting a text from my friend, I relaxed a bit, knowing it was not her. But it was still the craziest thing I’ve ever witnessed. And I’m still slightly traumatized as everything happened directly in front of me. I feel attached to this woman now. I witnessed her pain.
Coffee (the best coffee I’ve ever had in my life....perhaps because my soul has never needed it more than at that moment) and hugs from my friend calmed me down and began to warm my heart again. But we immediately started talking about the accident. How I had witnessed the whole thing....witnessed her pain and had felt completely helpless. How witnessing anyone’s pain immediately makes me feel helpless and trapped inside, because I just want to make it go away. We started then to talk about our own pain. Physical and emotional pain and scars...some of them still wounds needing to be healed.
If there’s anything I’ve been reminded of today, it’s that life is fragile. It’s that we live in a broken world. Which means that sometimes, CPR doesn’t work. Which means death. And pain. And brokenness. Truth is, things are not okay right now, and they won’t be until Jesus comes back. Yet at the same time, that’s our hope. Life is broken, but I’ll venture to say that it’s beautiful too. This beautiful painful confusing struggle of a thing called life only leaves us longing for more of Jesus. Longing for our true home. It leaves us cracked, but only able to let Jesus shine through those cracks. Because even though pain is here, hope is here too. There is death, but there is also life. There is pain but there is also rescue and redemption, because Jesus is still in the business of redemption. Letting Him lift you on His shoulders and walk through valleys with you suddenly becomes a less daunting task. So let’s embrace this broken life. Things are not okay right now but until then, this life leaves us looking to Hope and living in Hope, knowing that one day, things will be okay again.
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