A couple nights ago I was lying in bed, deep into reading my J.C. Ryle book on Holiness... when suddenly I heard a big crash outside our window. I sprung to my feet to see what was the matter. It had been very cold - almost zero degrees - and the roads were very icy. I knew in an instant that there had to be someone in the ditch up the road. Near our house there is a sharp bend that starts down a hill and when the wind blows up across that hill, it can get very dangerous with a little precipitation. I jumped in our car and drove up to the suspected bad spot in the road and, sure enough, there stood a very shaken young man shivering from the cold and the shock of having just ran his parents family car down over the embankment and into a tree. He had a knock on the head but looked like he was going to be OK. He refused my offer to stand in our warm house until his parents arrived. And also politely refused to sit in my car until they came. But it was zero degrees out and I wasn't sure he was thinking clearly, so in my 'dad' voice I insisted that he sit in the warmth of my car for the next 20 minutes until his dad and mom found him. Steven, a senior in high school, was visibly shaken and so we talked about alot of stuff. I wanted to make sure he was ok after hitting the tree and hitting his head.
"Some Christmas present...", I said to him. "Yeah, this really stinks", came his reply. I am not sure he got what I was saying, so I spelled it out for him: "You know if you had missed that tree, you would have gone over the embankment and slammed into a brick building at the bottom". "Oh, you mean this could have been much worse?". Some Christmas present for him and his family. Instead of having a funeral today, Steven got to open up gifts this morning.
Life: some Christmas present.
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