A GOD STORY

A few weeks ago, Drew was in a pretty serious accident. He was coming home from the mall and had just merged onto the highway. In a effort to avoid the braking of traffic in the right lane, he was going to merge into the left lane but didn't see the 15 passenger van that was there. He sideswiped that van (the driver said he didn't even feeling Drew hit him, just saw it) so Drew pulled back into his lane and then pulled off onto the shoulder as he had been instructed to do in an accident. Unfortunately, there was a pickup abandoned on the shoulder and Drew rear-ended it. The impact sent the pickup across two lanes of traffic colliding with a Hummer and it sent Drew into the ditch between the poles of a highway sign.

Drew called Jeff right away, who in turn called me. When Jeff arrived at the scene of the accident, he was pretty freaked out because it ended up being a lot worse than he was expecting. The police had stopped traffic on the highway and there were three ambulances with their lights flashing. Then he saw the truck in the ditch with the front end pretty mangled. No one was injured except for a few marks on Drew's arm from the airbag deploying and a stiff neck for two days.

The driver of the abandoned truck happened to drive by while all of this was going on. He stopped to see what had happened to his truck and was given a ticket. He said one of his tires was low on air so he had left it parked on the shoulder and was driving something else.

We had our pickup towed to the house, which sat in our driveway for five days and was a constant reminder of what could have happened had God not had His hand on the situation. Drew was, of course, was very shaken by the ordeal and didn't to drive for a while. But we insisted he "get back on the horse" the next day, with a few stipulations.

The next day, Thursday, the adjuster came out and spent about 45 minutes processing the damage and making a thorough report. I went out and talked to him and he told me he was going to have to total it, which was no surprise. We talked about how nice it was and how hard it would be to replace this 15 year old truck that was in such good condition. He sympathised with me because he had an old truck himself.

That afternoon as I sat down to pray about the situation, a lady from the insurance company called with the settlement. Jeff had spent time on line looking to see what the value of our truck would be the night before. It didn't look good. She told Jeff that the adjuster gave it a very good report and they decided to give us nearly twice as much for it as we were expecting, and they would pay for the tow.

On Friday, another insurance rep came out and brought us our check and picked up the title for the truck. Saturday, Jeff wanted to go look at a replacement truck that he had found online. It was in Olathe and I was making a trip over there to pick up some Bible study guides. When we found the truck, we saw that it was a manual transmission and knew that wouldn't be a good choice for Drew. As we were coming home, we decided to go by the used car lot where we bought Kylie's jeep. It's just a small lot that usually only has 10 or 12 cars at a time. They had one truck; a Dodge Ram. We took it for a test drive and liked it real well. We bought it for $200 less than what we got from the insurance company. It's seven years newer and has 30,000 less miles on it than ours did.

When I went back to get the title on Tuesday, the owner said he had been at the auto auction that morning to find a replacement truck. He found nothing that was as nice or cheap as what we got.

So, there you have it. This is totally a God story. He protected Drew and all the others involved in the accident from injury-MERCY. He provided a new truck-GRACE. We'd love for you to join with us in praying for Drew's court appearance on March 19 and the outcome of that.

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