Jesus, Take the Wheel?

Last Thursday evening, I was driving home with four of my housemates in the car when a man in a pickup truck blew through a stop sign and slammed into me. My car wound up in someone's front yard with the hood completely smashed and one rear taillight destroyed. Despite extensive damage, no one in my car was hurt except for a few bruises, and though an unbuckled 9-year-old in the truck lost a few teeth, it could have been much worse.

Once we had all calmed down and called the police, we were able to laugh a little. As we had started our drive home that night, in the midst of confusion about which way to turn at the first intersection, one of my friends had exclaimed, "Jesus, take the wheel!" We had all half-jokingly repeated the exhortation just minutes before the wreck.

The police came, and a few of our friends with whom we had just had dinner rushed over to check on us and to help take us and the contents of my trunk back to the house. As we surveyed the damage, someone remarked, "God must have really big plans for you guys, because he saved you all tonight."

At those words, I felt like a stone had dropped into my stomach. It's not that I don't believe it. One friend who came to help said he'd never seen a wreck with damage like that—severe damage to the front and the back of the car—where the area containing the passengers had been left intact. If I had been driving a tiny bit faster, my friend in the seat next to me would be seriously injured or maybe even dead. Someone was watching out for us that night.

But I have always struggled to balance gratitude for God's power to heal and protect with the knowledge that not everyone is healed and not every car crash ends the way ours did. In trying to wrap my mind around my friend’s assertion that I am important enough to God's plan for him to save me and my friends, I can't help but ask—what about people I know who have died in similar situations? What about Molly, the college student who worked with my youth group when I was in middle school and was killed in a head-on collision? Did God not have important enough plans for her?

I don’t know that I ever want a definitive answer to these questions. I sometimes feel like in this world we are too dissatisfied with mystery. If we are to serve the God who makes himself known in bread and wine, the God who allows some people to linger a little while on Earth but welcomes those who go home before we are ready to let them go, we have to be able to accept difficult mysteries.

I wonder if the only response we have to miracles and to tragedy alike is love. Whether rejoicing at someone being plucked out of the fire (John Wesley, anyone?) or mourning with someone for whom healing did not take the form they most wanted, we are told, "Let all that you do be done in love" (1 Corinthians 16:14). Maybe understanding is not the most important thing.