The Fourth Man In The Car

How Long?

“But you do not know what will happen tomorrow! Your life is like a mist. You can see it for a short time,
but then it goes away.”
James 4:14 (New Century Version)

How long does it take? One heartbeat? One blink of the eye? One breath? How long does it take for your life to completely change its direction? How quickly can everything you thought you knew about life and faith be challenged? For our family it took only one ring of a cell phone.
On the Saturday evening before Mother’s Day, 2005, my wife, Debbie, and I were sitting at home in our small third bedroom that had been converted into a family room. It was barely big enough for a recliner, a chair and a small TV. However, on this night we had added an ironing board to the mix because it was Saturday night at the Pastor’s house! Debbie was getting all the wrinkles out of our Sunday clothes while I was attempting to do the same with the sermon for the next day.
Our 16 year-old son, Clark, was following his normal Saturday night ritual of going to the mall with some friends. They usually spent a couple of hours playing video games and then would grab something to eat before his 9:30 curfew. While I realize that many parents are afraid to even mention the work “curfew”, it was never a problem with Clark. Maybe that’s because we really gave him no option. When he started to drive at age 16, we simply came to a “meeting of the minds” you might say. We informed him that if we didn’t “meet” him at the front door at the agreed upon time, then our “minds” were made up to take his car keys away. Amazingly he was never late.
It was nearing 9:30 on that Saturday evening and I was changing one of my PowerPoint slides while keeping an eye on a baseball game. I expected to hear the rattle of keys in the door at any second. In fact, Debbie had just asked me if it was about time for Clark to be home and I sort of scolded her and told her not to worry so much. She should relax and trust him more because he always kept his curfew. Then my cell phone rang.
Looking back on it now, five years later, I can’t help but be drawn to that ring. I can still hear it in my mind. It’s as if the phone was ringing to make an announcement to us - that our lives were about to change forever. In reality it was ringing to announce that our lives had already changed and they would never be the same again. It had already happened.
As I picked up my phone and looked at the display, I smiled and prepared for some good news. The call was coming from Chris, a member of the church that I pastored and a good friend. Chris and I had been working together on a remodeling project at the church and I assumed he was calling to fill me in on the day’s progress report. But not this time. In addition to being a church member and a friend, Chris was a fireman. He worked for our city fire department – a job that we had prayed he would be offered just months before.
As I answered the phone, I now heard my fireman friend say to me “Brother Keith, this is Chris. Clark has been in an accident and it’s pretty serious. They’re trying to get him out of the car right now. I think you and Debbie should get here as fast as you can”. When I heard those words I knew exactly what they meant. Chris was trying to tell us that we only had a few minutes to be with Clark before he died.
As I started to ask questions about where the accident was and how badly Clark was injured, I could see the panic growing in Debbie’s eyes. Her worst nightmare was coming true in that instant and I felt so helpless because there was nothing I could do to keep it from happening.
I know that the injury or death of a child could be described as any parent’s worst nightmare but it was different for us. We were married at age 19 while both of us were in college. I was already preparing to follow God’s calling to be a pastor and she was in nursing school. She will tell you that she chose nursing for one reason and one reason only – to make sure that we wouldn’t have to struggle all our lives on a pastor’s salary. So needless to say, she has never experienced a lot of fulfillment from her vocation as a nurse.
The exception to that, however, would be the 3 years she spent as a nurse in the Emergency Department and the 5 years she worked as a flight nurse. I remember how thrilled she was the day she was hired as a flight nurse. The job fit her God-given abilities perfectly.
She’s intelligent, loves challenges, has a keen ability to size up a situations and people in an instant. She’s also not afraid to try anything! She was pregnant with Clark while working as a flight nurse in Dayton, Ohio, so she kept a daily log for him about where he had traveled in the helicopter.
But while being a flight nurse might seem glamorous and exciting on the outside, it soon begins to take its toll on the inside. If you’ve ever watched the hit show ER then you know what I mean. Every day she would come home and need to “debrief” about what life-threatening emergencies she had flown into that day. Some might be critical heart patients or neo-natal transports but most were trauma. Many of them, especially the fatalities, were car wrecks. And most were car wrecks involving teenagers.
For years she had dreaded Clark turning 16 and beginning to drive. We had talked about it a hundred times and every time I reassured her that she had nothing to worry about. I told her that for starters, she needed to remember that she only saw the worst of the worst and that the odds of that ever being her son were slim to none. Secondly, I reminded her that our son was one of the most timid and careful kids we had ever seen. We actually had to sell a dirt bike that we bought him as a Christmas present when he was younger because he didn’t like to ride it. She had nothing to worry about.
Now here we were on this fateful Saturday night and I had just told her again not to worry about him – that he would be home any minute. As I hung up the phone I started to realize that not only could I not take away her fear but that I had lied to her all those years. Her nightmare was about to come true. He wasn’t coming home. He wasn’t fine. Her baby boy, our only child, was trapped in his car on the side of the road and he was going to die.