It was the spring of 2013, and my wife and I were returning home from a visit with our daughter and her family. While waiting for our ferry to arrive, I noticed my wife’s left calf was very swollen and red in color. I asked her about it, and she said she thought she pulled a muscle. The next morning I noticed it again and, over her objections, took her to the emergency room of a local hospital known for its heart and pulmonary health expertise.
After a series of tests including an MRI, the emergency doctor’s diagnosis was that my wife had a pulmonary embolism in her leg. He said to us that the embolism was only an inch away from requiring surgery that would have removed her entire leg! The gravity of the moment flooded over me in an instant. You see, embolisms run in my wife’s family. Both her father and her brother died from a pulmonary embolism, and our son had had one from a sports injury in college.
Fortunately, her doctor was highly specialized in such health matters and over the course of a year brought her back to health. But that isn’t the blessing that I am referring to in the title of this story. That manifested itself during a vacation my wife and I had planned for that summer.
Shortly after the pulmonary embolism occurred, I told my wife that we should cancel our plans to visit Maine that August. My wife really wanted to go on that vacation. She said as long as we made frequent stops along the way in order to exercise her leg she would be fine. I said to her after some deliberation that we would go on the vacation on two conditions.
The first condition was that she would agree not to drive at any time during the trip. Typically, on long trips we would split the driving. She would generally drive the easiest part of the route, and I would drive the balance. The second condition was that we obtain permission to go on the vacation from her doctor. She agreed, and when the time came, with the permission of her doctor, we set off for Maine.
We made it a leisurely drive with many stops along the way to Moosehead Lake. After spending three wonderful days there, we set off for Camden, Maine, on the next leg of our vacation. It was a bright, sunny Tuesday morning. As we got into our Highlander, little did we know what would unfold within the hour.
As I was driving along a long straightaway, I noticed two cars approaching from the other direction. When we were about four hundred feet apart, the lead car in the opposite lane began to drift into my lane. The highway was a two-lane road, one in each direction, with four-foot-deep drainage ditches on both sides of the highway. As the car’s drifting became more pronounced, it was obvious that if I did not make a dramatic move, we were going to have a head-on collision and certain death.
It was then that my body’s adrenaline kicked in. It was as though everything slowed down in that instant. In less than a split second, I had evaluated my three options. The first option was to jam on my breaks. The second was to turn into the opposite lane and travel as fast as I could to reach the apron on the opposite side of the road to avoid the second car that was traveling close behind. The third option was to hit the accelerator to pick up speed and to get as far over to the right as I could without ending up in the ditch. I can remember thoughtfully evaluating each option. The effects of the adrenaline made a split-second decision seem like it lasted ten seconds or more!
Breaking would have resulted in a head-on collision. Turning left into an oncoming car to reach the apron on the other side of the highway posed two risks: a head-on collision with the second car and the high likelihood of driving into the ditch on the opposite side of the road, if I got past that second oncoming car. Both of these risks posed likely fatal outcomes as well. Hitting a four-foot-deep ditch traveling 70 miles or more per hour would have resulted in our Highlander flipping over several times. So I chose the third option.
I put the pedal to the medal, as they say, and accelerated my speed, closing the distance with the oncoming car to bypass its projected path, while at the same time turning as gradually as I could to the right without tipping into the ditch. A hundred feet away, then fifty feet! It was going to be extremely close. My right side wheels were halfway off the apron with nothing but air underneath them.
I can still recall how close we were when he passed me on the left. In fact, if time had stopped when he was right next to me, and if our windows were open, I could have reached out and grabbed his face. I thought for sure he was going to hit my rear fender, but somehow his car cleared it.
Once safely past, I turned my car back onto the highway and looked into my rearview mirror. I saw his car driving off into the ditch and then hitting a driveway with a culvert through it. His car launched into the air, reminiscent of an Evil Knievel jump! He sailed some eight feet into the air, clearing the driveway and landing in the ditch on the other side. As he landed, fenders and bumpers flew off his vehicle. After a couple hundred feet it came to a halt.
I stopped the car and told my wife to call 911 to report the accident with a message to send an ambulance. I got out of my car to see the condition of the driver, hoping that he was still alive. To my utter amazement, an elderly man staggered out of the car! I thought that he must have been drunk. I approached him closely to find out if I could smell alcohol on his breath. I didn’t smell any. I asked him what had happened. He said that he had had a pain in his neck and then didn’t recall anything after that. The man likely had a stroke and blacked out!
I returned to my vehicle and told my wife what the man had said. She immediately asked me why I turned to the right and that if she were behind the wheel she would have turned to the left. When she said that, a cold chill ran down the back of my spine. I knew instantly that a turn to the left would have been fatal for both of us.
And then the Great Blessing became apparent! You see without that pulmonary embolism she would have been behind the wheel that morning, for it was the easiest stretch of road that we would be traveling on that day.
I had been given a great blessing but never considered that it could be anything other than a cross—that is, until that moment. I’m sure God did not give my wife a pulmonary embolism, but He allowed it to happen, knowing the circumstances that would unfold. I think it’s fair to say that one doesn’t often see a great blessing made manifest in the form of a heavy cross. That day I did, and it has had a profound spiritual effect on me ever since!
Someday, if you are carrying a heavy cross, consider the possibility that there might just be a hidden blessing there as well.
