I was working at an ambulance station in a rural town on a major highway in Australia. It was one of those sunny afternoons when, even though you know better and your experience tells you otherwise, you still don’t expect bad things to drop out of the sky onto your head.

We were called to a collision between a car and a semi-trailer ten miles south of town. When we arrived, we were told by a harassed-looking policeman that there was a "dead kid over there," and he pointed to an incongruous blue child seat, its back to us, upright on the road. He then said that we needn’t go and look as she had "lost most of her head in the prang."

I would normally have gone and looked immediately just to make certain, but I knew the officer in this case and it is fairly hard to mistake decapitation, so I took his word for it, which was accurate as matters turned out.

The rest of the scene lay before me, with five patients still alive: one woman in her thirties, the driver of the car; two older children; the driver’s elderly mother; and the truck driver. All except the truck driver had serious injuries—broken limbs and lacerations to their heads, chests, and bodies. We were fifty miles from a major town further south and I called for backup. Then my partner and I proceeded to triage and provide care in a stream of consciousness familiar to emergency workers.

I found myself sometime later looking up and seeing that we had done everything we could. All our patients were on stretchers or backboards—we had only two stretchers in our truck and were still waiting for more to arrive. We had done all of the paramedic things—applying splints, offering reassurance, handing out blankets, and administering IV’s, drugs, and oxygen. All of our patients were conscious, and they all knew that little sister (seven years old) was dead. If I looked up, I saw trees and sky and a lovely afternoon. If I looked down a bit, I saw something else, in a kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t sort of way.

I talked to the mother. She was driving at the time of the accident. Her car had crossed the centerline of the road, colliding with the semi-trailer in a glancing, head-on, corner-to-corner fashion that impacted on her door, scooped out and ejected the child behind her, and rolled the car over and over. The truck driver was shaken but unhurt and waited with the police, giving his statement in a dazed sort of way that people do when these things happen.

It was immediately clear to the mother and me that this crash was all her fault. She knew it and stoically suffered us manipulating her nearly severed right arm to restore some circulation. She looked me in the eye and said, "It’s alright isn’t it?" with an upward lift in her voice that told me she needed for it to be so, in some way. I have been in such situations before and my one rule is not to tell easy, small, convenient white lies when people need and deserve the truth, yet may not have time for polite insincerities.

"No," I replied, "it’s not alright." I paused briefly. "But it’s OK for it to be that way just now." She seemed to understand and started to cry quietly for the first time since the accident had occurred forty minutes before, forty-one minutes after she had a seven-year-old daughter and a right arm and no greater problem than getting to Melbourne in time for whatever or whomever was waiting. Before her were months of physical healing and a lifetime of dealing with an event that required only a few seconds of inattention to occur.

My statement to her may seem hard for some people, but it is a simple truth that Nietzsche alluded to when he claimed that those things that don’t kill us makes us stronger.1 It appeared to me from watching such experiences among others that this lady would live through the ordeal, albeit with scars of the physical and psychological kind. However, she would come through, and the horror of the present would be replaced with something else. I hope she choses the positives—the value of what and who is left behind and the need to remember—in an appropriate and meaningful way.

I often think back on that woman, her broken family, and her uncertainty about the future. She is like me and I am like her. I can look at the damage I have done, the injuries I have caused myself and others, and I know it is not alright; I am certain of my culpability. I can link cause to effect in my actions, and no amount of shifting blame to my society, my advantages and limitations, or God’s decision to allow sin to endure or any other thing can move the blame from me—it is mine.

I accept Jesus’ forgiveness and experience the renewal he gives in return for some part of my innocence. I forgive myself and know that I am a sinner. Jesus tells me this and accepts me, but the results of my actions remain to haunt me.

Oprah tells of her discovery that the bad feelings she dealt with by overeating were OK.2 It was, she discovered, OK to experience these feelings without having to resort to destructive culinary responses. The feelings were finite in their ability to hurt, and responding by eating only gave them more life and affirmed their hold over her.

We are confronted with murderers and abusers and genocide and we ask the same question, "Is this alright?" Obviously it is not, but apparently it is OK for things to be that way just now. God has a long view that we lack (Gen. 3:22; Rev. 1:18), and he will eventually provide true justice for murdered children and raped mothers. He has promised that things will be alright in the end. This is called hope, the fruit of love that "hopes all things and believes all things" (1 Cor. 13:7 NKJV).

If I love, I choose to believe that things will eventually be alright in God. As a rational human, I can see with my eyes and hear with my ears that they aren’t OK at present. But as a Christian and as a follower of the author of love and infinite patience, I see that it is OK for them to be that way just now.

Ask yourself these two questions: Is it alright for you just now? Does it have to be?

Notes and References

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophise with a Hammer (1888; reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 1978).
2. Joey Shulman, "Eating to Feel," Alive.

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