My View From the Asphalt

In the middle of a sunny summer morning, as I biked in the bike lane on a busy city street, I saw a car come to a complete stop in the exit from the library parking lot that I was just about to pass. Assuming the driver had seen me, I rode in front of the exit just as she drove onto the road, right into my path.

“You’re going to hit me! You’re going to hit me!” I screamed.

In that millisecond of the terrifying realization of what was going to happen and my utter powerlessness to stop it, time slowed, then rushed forward as I found myself on the asphalt, my damaged bike lying by the car’s tire. I scrambled to the side of the road on my hands and knees, exclaiming a gasping, grateful hallelujah: “Thank you, Jesus! I’m alive! I’m alive!” Again and again: “I’m alive!”

In my view from the asphalt, I saw that chaos and confusion ensued. “Don’t touch anything!” a man yelled as he called 911. Cars stopped. Curious onlookers gawked. The driver got out of her car, devastated that she had hit me, crying in shock and incomprehension.

No one approached me. I felt alone.

Until a woman came and changed everything for me.

Without a word, she knelt by my side and held my hand as I cried in terror and joy and euphoria at being alive. Did she say amen? Did she pray out loud with me? I think she did, but I can’t be sure because of the panic confusing my thoughts and jolting my emotions. But I felt then, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jesus was holding my hand through hers, and the stranger and I were in the presence of the Lord of life.

Then I heard sirens. Fire trucks. Police. Ambulance. Help was on the way.

The woman left without my noticing as first responders attended to me.

I’ve passed that parking lot exit many times in the more than eight years since the crash that miraculously left me with only a superficially bruised knee and a deeper sense of my frailty and the thin space between earth and heaven. Each time I recall it, I thank God for sparing my life.

I often think about the woman who met me in my vulnerability. Entering in, treading lightly, risking involvement, leaving without fanfare. She was a hand-holder; a runner to hardship, not a runner from adversity; a cross-bearer, not a cross-avoider.

Onlookers at the scene might have assumed that help arrived when the first responders came. But my view from the asphalt told a different story. Human help, guided by our sovereign God, had already arrived in the hand-holding, running-to-hardship cross-bearer. Small, shaken, and shocked that day, I was yet in a sacred space, sheltered and saved from death with a servant of the Lord by my side.