Epiphany Stories: The Alger Family
In late August of 2020 my family and I were going to Grandma’s house, and we literally went over the river and through the woods.
I had a few emails to answer that morning, so my wife Karen was driving and our two boys, Eli and Silas, were in the backseat of my truck as we travelled to Cary via I-40. About 20 minutes outside of Greensboro, a car changed lanes and hit us in the rear right fender. The force of the impact sent us into an uncontrollable spin at 75 mph. We spun to the side of the road, and when our tires hit the muddy shoulder they dug into the sod and we flipped onto our hood. We rolled at least once before coming to rest in a copse of trees.
I unbuckled my seat belt and turned with fear and trembling to look over my family. Joy upon joy, although we were all covered with glass and had minor cuts and bruises, we were all relatively healthy. Bending the doors to get out of the vehicle, I was shocked to see the damage. The truck was destroyed. Every metal panel was crushed or dented, almost every window was smashed, the roof was caved in, and the airbags hung loosely into our seats.
The four of us stood next to the truck. We were all shaking, we all had tears in our eyes, and Silas was missing his shoes. We embraced as a family, and we prayed. We stood amidst the twisted metal and shards of glass with small trickles of blood on our faces, and we thanked the Lord. We praised him for his mercy. We praised him for his protection. We thanked him for saving our lives. I have never praised more earnestly, nor have I ever experienced the presence of God more closely than in that moment. In one of our most horrible moments, he was there in the midst of us.
I looked down the path of crushed vegetation and scarred asphalt, and I began to realize just how much God had intervened. There was a tractor-trailer stalled on the side of the road, and before that was an overpass. If our accident had taken place 15 feet sooner, we would have smashed directly into the semi. If it had been 50 feet sooner, we would have been run up under the highway bridge and slammed into metal and concrete. In the area where we spun off the road we travelled through soft mud and leapt over a drainage ditch. When we slid on our hood we were slowed by the soft vegetation on the gentle incline of the berm of the highway, and instead of tumbling into a hard, hazardous surface that would have abruptly ended our roll, we rolled over on soft Leyland Cypress trees that gently laid us back on our wheels. 30 more feet and the muddy banks of that drainage ditch we skipped over were lined with jagged rocks. Somehow we had been guided between bridge abutments, past an 80,000 pound block of steel, in front of jagged granite rocks, and up the one stretch of road that led to relative safety. The Lord’s hand was undeniable.
“The Lord, however, has moved mightily in my heart to teach me compassion for those who do not deserve it—just as he has shown it to me even though I do not deserve it either.”
The car that hit us left the scene. I pray for that driver often. How does someone hit another vehicle, see it spin and roll, and then simply leave? Was the driver intoxicated? Was it a teenager who fled in a moment of fear? How is he/she handling this now? Does the driver of that car lay awake at night wondering if he/she killed another human being? One part of me wants to pray for terrible things to happen to that person. I mean, they almost killed my wife and children! Give them boils, Lord! Make them crash! At least disrupt his WIFI and make him spend hours with Comcast customer service! The Lord, however, has moved mightily in my heart to teach me compassion for those who do not deserve it—just as he has shown it to me even though I do not deserve it either. When I sin and run, God does not pray for my destruction. He pursues me. He offered me forgiveness, and brought me into his family. So, I have asked God to form my heart into the shape of his. Over the months since the accident I will admit that I have waffled back and forth: “Curse him, Lord!.... No, please forgive me Lord…..Bless him Lord….Well, maybe just a little curse?” As I have wrestled with the Lord, he has truly brought me to the point of honestly praying for the blessing and flourishing of my highway “enemy.” I pray often that the Lord will use this experience to bring this person to the knowledge and love of Jesus Christ, that he/she will know the mercy, love, grace, and yes—even the blessing of God. I am still praying for the Wi-Fi thing though, Lord help me.
“God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
-2 Corinthians 12:9
Praise God, bruises faded and Karen and the boys had no lasting physical injuries. I had a soft tissue injury in my neck that left me unable to turn my head. So, for three months I endured some pretty painful chiropractic/PT care. I’m not good at being broken, so I used those times of stretching and being cracked to pray—to not let Satan get a foothold for discouragement or frustration, but instead to ask the Holy Spirit to use the healing of my body to continue to heal my soul. I begged for patience, for perseverance, for healing. I memorized and recited the words of Paul, “God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me (2 Corinthians 12:9).” I look back on that uncomfortable treatment as a very difficult, but somehow very sweet time with God. I am much better now and I can freely move my neck, although I do not deny the charge of at times continuing to be stiff-necked from a biblical perspective.
The emotional toll was difficult. All our family members handled the trauma differently, and I will leave their stories for them to tell. I will say that we all had nightmares at different times and were extremely tense the next few times that we had to drive on the highway.
One thing that I found surprising in my own response was that I felt a lot of fear in my woodworking shop—a place where I usually go for rest and rejuvenation. I felt a new anxiety around the saws and potentially dangerous instruments. I found support in the midst of this in a most unexpected place: a Facebook group. I hardly ever post on Facebook, and never, never, never post anything personal. I am involved in a couple of discussion groups about my hobby of woodworking, and in a moment of weakness, or inspiration, or both, I asked one of the groups if anyone had ever experienced fear in their shops after a traumatic experience. The number of comments was astounding. Person after person shared their similar experiences and how they worked through them, and others chimed in saying that they were in the same place but had not been willing to share. I responded to tell them how I was dealing with this in prayer, and that lead to multiple discussions about Jesus with people who had never turned to him in those difficult moments. One day I went into my shop and turned on my loud table saw. I just let it run. And as I stood there, I asked the Lord to continue to heal what I didn’t even know what still broken. During that time of prayer, the Lord helped me see that just as I have to cut a lot of wood in that shop and sand off gauges and rough edges to make something beautiful, he would use situations like this accident to cut and shape me in his image as well. I took a couple of months off from the shop, but I’m back in there now and some folks got some pretty nice Christmas presents.
“I want to encourage you: fall in your fear, your distress, and your pain at the foot of the cross. God can handle your honesty, your questions, your anger. When you waffle, he gives grace. When you weep, he consoles. He grants peace.”
I wanted to tell you this story for two reasons. One, I want God to receive the glory and give him public thanks for how he has been gracious to my family and me. Two, I know that all of us suffer at some point. I know that many of you are suffering right now in even deeper ways than I have recalled here. What if we had all not walked away from that accident? Could I still pray as I have prayed? I want to believe so. In fact, I pray so. If I wrestled in prayer after this experience, how much more would I if the outcome had been more tragic? And that is exactly the kind of grief many of you are even currently experiencing. I want to encourage you: fall in your fear, your distress, and your pain at the foot of the cross. God can handle your honesty, your questions, your anger. When you waffle, he gives grace. When you weep, he consoles. He grants peace. It may not be instantaneous, but he heals. Don’t turn away, don’t draw conclusions that because you are hurting God is not real. Let him be all the more real to you in your trauma.
I am not thankful for our traumatic accident, but I am thankful for how the Lord has redeemed it. I am grateful for how he is continuing to shape me through it. I am thankful every night when I tuck in my children and lay down next to my wife that our God is a God who is living and active and near. And I am full of compassion for those who may have an empty bed in their homes because an accident or illness ended in the death or brokenness of someone they love. As we came close to death ourselves, I am all the more in awe that our God not only sustains in this world, but that his comfort lasts even beyond the grave, into the life of the world to come through the victory of his resurrection.
-The Rev. Canon Dr. Dan Alger
