“Reality came starkly home to me nine weeks ago today when I was driving on a winding road in Colorado. Suddenly, I missed a curve and my Ford Explorer slipped off the pavement and started tumbling side to side at 60 miles per hour. An ambulance appeared, and I spent the next seven hours strapped to a body board, with duct tape across my head to keep it from moving. A CAT scan showed that a vertebra high on my neck had been shattered, and sharp bone fragments were poking out next to a major artery. The hospital had a jet to fly me to Denver for emergency surgery.
“I had one arm free, with a cell phone and little battery time left. I spent those tense hours calling people close to me, knowing it might be the last time I would ever hear their voices. It was an odd sensation to lie there helpless, aware that though I was fully conscious, at any moment I could die.
“Samuel Johnson said when a man is about to be hanged, ‘it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ When you’re strapped to a body board after a serious accident, it concentrates the mind. . . . I realized how much my life focused on trivial things. During those seven hours, I didn’t think about how many books I had sold or what kind of car I drove (it was being towed to a junkyard anyway). All that mattered boiled down to four questions: Whom do I love? Whom will I miss? What have I done with my life? And am I ready for what’s next?”
- Philip Yancey (from a sermon given at Virginia Tech two weeks after the shootings . . . from Christianity Today)
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From yesterday’s baby blessing at the the SW Central Church in Houston. Here are two of the three babies who were blessed: Reese Cope and Truitt Ross with their mommies.
This was a fantastic speech by Yancey. I’ve seen it linked several other places as well. It’s tough to know what to say to a community that suffered the way VT did, but it seemed as if Yancey got as close as one can get to “nailing it.”
We do complicate this life with trivial things, don’t we? Why does it take a life-altering event to show us this?
Thanks for posting this, Mike.
Great quote. Sweet babies.
Reese and Truitt are too cute! I’m sure Jenna and Kayci were two very proud mamas.
We who have committed ourselves to Christ have experiance a “life altering event”. We should live our lives as if our flesh is already dead, because it is, we killed it and laid it at the cross. We should live fearlessly, with crystal clarity, and purpose. Maybe we (I) have some more dying to do, in order to live.
Thanks for the quote Mike
Sadly… there is NOTHING in this world that brings perspective on life like tragedy.
Unfortunately … it often has to happen to us to get us to seriously ask questions like these: “Whom do I love? Whom will I miss? What have I done with my life? And am I ready for what’s next?â€
Is Reese all for this blogging thing? Hey, she’s not old enough to vote - keep the photos comin’!
Someday when you get the chance I’d love to hear about your baby blessing services. We are a young military church with LOTS of new arrivals. Whenever a baby is born into our family we have a prayer for them during Sunday morning worship. What other elements comprise your services?
You don’t know how much reading this has meant to me. Thanks for sharing Mr. Yancey’s words with us.
I need to find that message from Mr. Yancey. It sounds incredible. I’ve been haunted since my teen years about the question of whether I’ll live my life as well as possible, and I’m afraid that lately my answer would have to be “no.”
Great post. Thanks for sharing these words from Philip Yancey.
Yancy is right on as usual. Had he left us, Christianity would have lost a respected spokesperson for the cause of Christ among non-believers.
Looks like your sermon had an effect on Truitt!
Please keep us updated on your condition. You will be in my prayers.
Your post reminds me why I have the following quotation on my office door where I see it every day: “All that is not eternal is eternally useless” - C. S. Lewis.
Precious cute babies!!! and beautiful mommies! Great to share in such a special day together!
Yancey has a great book about grace. I’m trying to remember its name. It’s a thick one, like 300 pages. I first heard about it on a Christian forum.