This post is NSFW and may be upsetting to some. A young woman lies dead on a road, her life taken from her without warning and without recourse. She looks young, perhaps twenty-something. I’ve seen people her age in similar circumstances. While working at a military hospital in Myrtle Beach, SC almost forty-six years ago, two women were rushed to our emergency room. A pair of dangerous men robbed a coin or stamp collector in Charleston, SC before killing him. They then fled north on Hwy 17 late that night. Hwy 17 is called the Ocean Highway among residents on the Grand Strand. Just south of Mytle Beach, they stopped at a convenience store ostensibly for fuel. They were the only customers there. A female clerk approximately 22 years of age and her girl friend of about the same age were passing the time until the clerk’s shift was over. Only twenty more minutes to go. The men came into the store and looked around to be sure there was no one else there. They shot one woman with a small caliber handgun and the other with a shotgun. Then they left. At some point someone noticed the women on the floor and dialed 911. After the ambulance arrived at the scene, the victims were quickly loaded and the medics transported the victims to the closest hospital, which was ours. Meanwhile, the gunmen arrived in Myrtle Beach and promptly barricaded themselves in a motel room on the beach where they were shot to death, themselves, the next day by law enforcement officials. These are the details I remember almost half a century later, and I may have overlooked one thing or mistated another. Also, I deliberately avoided mentioning certain circumstances of the crime.
We worked frantically on the two victims. As both women had gunshot wounds to the head, it was an uphill battle. Our MOD (medical officer-of-the-day) was positively heroic, and between the civilian ambulance drivers, the radiology and lab techs, the extra nurses pulled from the upstairs ward and the ER personnel, and the DPS officer present, there wasn’t a dry eye in the trauma room when the event called. One woman survived, one woman did not. Neither had any idea earlier that evening that this would happen. When you work in situations like this, you sometimes wonder, or at least I do: “What if . . .?” What if the gunmen drove by the convenience store without stopping? Or, what if they went south from Charleston towards Savannah instead of north? What if they hadn’t shot the women in the first place? What if you could turn back the clock just an hour, enough time to warn the two girls to flee approaching death, knowing after the fact what would happen? These two women might have gotten married, had children and been grandmothers by now. Then there are the broader, existential questions. Why does God allow this to happen? Why did it happen to them and not to two other people? Why did one survive and the other not?
But let’s go back to the pedestrian in the roadway portrayed in the photos. Another untimely death. Hit by a drunk driver? Thrown from a crashing car because she was not wearing seat belts? Murdered somewhere else and her body dumped unceremoniously along the road?
It could happen to me
Years later, it was almost me on the slab. I was teaching at university and had a ninety-mile drive home one night in early December of 1992. Most of the drive was on a sixty-five mile per hour divided highway through open country in Texas. It was around 10:30 p.m. and there was light, freezing drizzle on the roadway. Ahead of me on a southboud lane, I noticed a car had run off the road. Five minutes later, I noticed another car in the median, so I reduced my speed. When I approached a rise in the road about a quarter of a mile away, I noted the tail lights of a car on the right side of the road and it appeared that the car was not moving. On the left shoulder, I notice a pair of head lights pointed at me, but they were somehow askew. In fact, they appeared closer together than normal because the car was at a thirty degree angle to me. I slowed down to a crawl, and saw that one vehicle had run up on the guard rails of a bridge, so it was partly hanging off the side of the bridge, with the front right wheel still slowly turning. I drove a hundred or so feet beyond the bridge, pulled off the road, stopped, put my emergency flashers on and carefully slipped and slid up the roadway to the bridge and the vehicle on the guard rails. There was a driver inside whose chest had hit the steering wheel pretty hard. This sort of jolt can sometimes fracture the sternum and even stop the heart. As I was attempting exaluate his injuries and extricate him from the vehicle, I heard two other cars approaching the bridge that had lost control on the black ice and they were speeding directly towards me. I was about to be pinned between the guard rail of the bridge and the front of a car traveling at well over forty miles per hour. Without thinking, I leapt over the guard rail of the bridge. Fortunately for me in the pitch darkness of that cold (twenty eight degree) night, the bridge was less than ten feet high and I landed on my back in water. The water was about eight or ten feet deep because I settled upright in mud up to my knees and was able to swim to the surface and then to the bank. By the time I reached my car, my clothing was stiff from the cold. I noticed other people had stopped by then and were assisting the driver, so I got in my car and continued driving home, shivering until the heat in my car kicked in. But if the bridge were higher than it was, or if there was a railroad track or rocks under the bridge instead of water, I might have broken my back. Or, had I panicked or couldn’t swim well enough to get out of the water, I might have perished, and no one might have thought to even look over the side of the bridge to discover me. My colleages at university had a hoot over this in the office the next day but, of course, they weren’t there.
It could happen to you
Many of us have had similiarly close calls, not from motor vehicle accidents necessarily, but perhaps from other types of accidents, childhood illnesses, combat, even close calls you might not have been aware of.
According to a recent report on NPR, the number of pedestrians being killed by motor vehicles is at a forty year high. In an article from last summer, NPR noted:
A new study paints a grim picture of American roads: every day, 20 people walkoutside and end up killed by a moving vehicle.“
New Mexico, Arizona and Florida are the most deadly places for pedestrians, but living elsewhere in the U.S. does not provide you with any immunity. More than 7,500 pedestrians in the U.S. were killed in 2022. Their bodies were flung hundreds of feet into the brush or the ditch, or they landed on the asphalt like this woman did. Others were struck by a second vehicle from the opposite direction when the driver of the second vehicle could not avoid them in time. But motor vehicle accidents are only one way to lose your life. In the same year (2022), 73,654 died from Fentanyl overdose. Keep in mind, an unknown percentage of these victims had no idea they were being exposed to this deadly drug in the first place. In 2022 there were 46 school shootings where a number of children of all ages were fatally shot at their desks. Almost one million older people each year die from heart disease and cancer. In 2021, “the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC.” The statitics go on and on.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah
God had created a paradise for us eons ago and we used our free will and rebellion to utterly turn it upside down, weaponizing everything from the polio virus to the atom. We pollute our minds and our environment. We deliberately spead STI’s (née STD’s) to others without their awareness. Fortunately, we don’t have to spend eternity here; we will die. King David said to God: “My entire life is just a moment to you.” But then the question emerges concerning what will happen to us when we die? What is the next chapter in our existence? Where is the next chapter in our existence? The devil works overtime telling us “Don’t worry, be happy.” Yet, we are somehow incomplete. We are like people who learn they had been orphaned in the past and are trying to discover who they really are and how did they come to be adopted? Others of us wonder what the hope is for humanity in the future as we now stand on the brink of World War III? One more statistic. In 2022 a total of 49,449 Americans decided that there was absolutely no hope for the future or for them and they ended their lives. Or, as some might say, they checked out early.
God does not want you to do this. He loves you and wants an opportunity to show you His love if you let Him. He does not force Himself on you, instead repecting your right to do what you want with your life. But if you want something better, then you have His complete attention.
In a recent post I discussed a Bible passage from II Corinthians 6:2. The verse quotes God saying “This is the day for you to be saved.” Today, as you read this. Not tomorrow, because tomorrow is not promised to you and you might not have another opportunity. In an analysis of this verse God says “now (νῦν) is the time of God’s favor, now (νῦν) is the day of salvation.” This term for “now” (νῦν) means “emphatically now” at the present time, not during some future undefined period of duration.
Happy New Year (2025)
It is my fervent wish that in January of 2025 I will be celebrating the new year with my loving wife, Deena, writing even more posts to my blog. This is her desire as well. But that eventuality is uncertain (at least to me) and not promised. I have only today. If I have unfinished business, if there is someone I must forgive or someone I have wronged, now is the time for me to take care of it, and not to presume on God’s grace and put it off. If my relationship with God is estranged, now is the time to repair that as well, and if I don’t know His love and forgiveness personally, then now, today, νῦν is the time to experience it.
Life is uncertain, but there is one thing we can be sure of–God’s mercy, His forgiveness and His love. To learn more about God’s love and becoming a Christian, click here.
