This is the final remark in the diary of my then fifteen-year-old sister the day I became a Christian.
22/04/05: ...praise the Lord coz he was with my brother all the way.
My sister showed me the full entry a couple of weeks ago. I consider what happened to me every day, but these words really struck me.
As with a lot cheesy testimonies, the story really starts when I was only a few years old, though I became a Christian when I was twelve. I was not a happy child. We had a variety of troubles at home. Though in retrospect I feel fortunate to have had, and still have, two parents who have a strong marriage, at the time I felt that I was very unfortunate. I didn’t see much of my Dad; I remember sleeping next to my mum, where he usually slept, when he was away. In fact, it’s my earliest memory. But I want to be clear, my Dad is a good man, and he wasn’t entirely responsible for how I was feeling. I was also bullied every day at school. I have very few memories of my primary school, but the majority of what I can remember is not particularly happy. Consequently I spent much of my childhood wrongly presuming that I was unloved. I knew my Mum loved me, but I felt that that didn’t really count for much. As a result of this, I didn’t love myself. While I often came across as arrogant – a weakness that I still suffer today – I hated myself. I would get incredibly angry about the most insignificant occurrences, sometimes culminating in my breaking things. I was probably very scary to live with, and I knew that. This only strengthened me in my convictions that no one loved me.
In 2004 I started high school. For a short while, the bullying stopped. I think everyone was too busy becoming accustomed to everything. After the first term, it started again, and I spiralled into depression. I went to church, reluctantly; my family were all Christians. Before this point I had concluded that if there was a God, I hated Him: I thought that if He existed, He must enjoy watching people suffer. For this reason it makes my actions over the next few weeks an even greater mystery to me: I would lie awake in bed at night considering different ways that I could not only get positive attention from my peers at school, but also ways that God could prove to me that He exists, and that He loves me. I came to the decision that getting hit by a car, and surviving, would kill two birds with one stone, as it were. I remember challenging God, quite flippantly, commanding Him to save my life.
On the night of 21st April 2005, I once again fantasised about getting hit by a car. However, the daydream I had was far more vivid than the previous ones. I could see everything in immense detail. And for the first time ever I could see cars around me, and an ambulance. It was near a pedestrian crossing: there were people in the uniforms of my school around me; an ambulance was facing the wrong way on the road; there was a blonde haired woman, standing next to a brown haired woman, looking down at me; I was lying on the road, with blood pouring from my head, which was resting upon a white coat; there were two cars at the scene - one was a large green MPV, the other a silver SUV. Ordinarily, only one car would stop, of course - the one that was involved in the collision – so the fact that there were two cars was particularly remarkable to me. Amazing as this was at the time; I quickly fell asleep afterwards, and forgot all about it.
The next morning my vision was a bit like a dream that you can only vaguely remember after you wake up. As usual, I was late to meet my friend Arun, so I walked particularly quickly towards Kingsway to cross. When I arrived at the curb, I saw that there were cars coming towards me, but I decided that I needed to cross if I wanted to avoid a detention. So I started running. First, I dodged a particularly large car – a green MPV - but there are two lanes on Kingsway, it’s a dual carriageway. In the next lane there was a silver SUV. When I saw it, I immediately thought I was going to die. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. It didn’t happen in slow motion like it does in films. All I can remember is seeing that car coming in my direction very quickly indeed.
I cannot describe to you how happy I was when I woke up. It was, however, slightly bittersweet as I was rolling down the road, smacking my already damaged head on the tarmac as I went. I stopped rolling, and stood up. Immediately I felt an intense pain in my lower back, I had probably landed on it when I fell. I shouted in pain, “Argh! My back!” and dropped to the floor. I heard a scream as someone got out of the car that hit me: a blonde-haired woman, called Linda. Directly to the right of me, a brown-haired woman arrived, followed by Linda, my head of year, who had been driving the MPV. They called for an ambulance, which couldn’t come down the road in the right direction: there was far too much stopped traffic, so it ended up arriving the wrong way down the road! My vision had become reality. I began to come to terms with what had happened. I remembered my daydreams and the challenge I had put to God. Immediately I knew He was there, and He’d saved me.
When I arrived at the hospital, the Doctor described how I was probably hit by the wing-mirror, otherwise I wouldn’t have survived. He also said that had I been hit two inches to the right, in my temple, my skull would have been crushed. On top of all this, he said I must have fainted before I was hit , meaning that had I fainted any earlier, I would have been crushed under the back wheel. If I had fainted later than I did, I would have been crushed under the front wheels. His exact words were (excuse the expletive) ‘You were bloody lucky, mate.’ The precautionary x-ray revealed that I didn’t have any broken or fractured bones. I walked out of the hospital just hours after I went in, bearing superficial injuries; though my older sister said I looked like Frankenstein's monster: I remember watching TV wearing sunglasses for a few weeks afterwards, which I found amusing. I was back at school two weeks afterwards, and when I got there, a crowd circled me, asking me questions about what happened. I got the attention that I craved. No one bullied me for months afterwards.
I think it’s fair to say that no one has every fainted on Kingsway in front of cars going 30-40mph and come away so unscathed. In simple terms, it could’ve happened a thousand times, and I would still be extremely unlikely to survive once. That’s what I think about now, six years later. I never think about the vision, because I convince myself that I’ve remembered wrong, because it seems too incredible to be true. I think to myself how God took my consciousness at the exact moment it needed to happen, how He designed me specifically for that moment to fall in the way that I did, at the speed that I did. God has loved me since before time itself, and He proved that to me on the 22nd April 2005, at 8.35am, and He’s proved it time and time again throughout my life. He gave me the strength to forgive the bullies, and now some of them are among my very best friends. The issues of my childhood have disappeared. God remains faithful to me, and my family. My sister didn’t realise when she wrote it, but I believe she was unintentionally writing a deeply philosophical and theological statement about the nature of God: the fact that He is faithful, and He is with us all 'all the way'
