A Gift You Give to Yourself

In our lesson today in church, we talked about forgiveness. In particular, we spoke of the power that comes to us in forgiving others. As the instructor taught the lesson, my mind wandered back to an autumn night over ten years ago when I slammed into the back of a construction truck, illegally parked in the fast lane of the freeway.

It was a sensory overload. My ears were still ringing from the loud bang of the collision. The air was heavy with the overpowering smell of steam, oil, spent radiator fluid, and whatever set off the explosion of the air bag.

As my head began to clear, I relived, for a moment, the sheer terror that ripped through me as the truck came up in my headlights. I had enough time to think, "Oh no!" before the air bag hit my face. I looked at my shattered hands which were bent at odd angles and the bones that were coming through my wrists and I had my first rational thought after the crash, "I think I'm in shock because that really looks like it ought to hurt"

My next thought is that enough time had passed so that people should be attending to me. After all, I was not that far from the construction site. Surely they had heard the sound of the accident and had come running.

"I must have killed whoever I hit". I thought. I knew that the accident was unavoidable but, nevertheless, I wondered how I was going to live with myself from then on. It was not long afterwards that a man in a hard hat, poked his head from around the truck that I hit. I found out later what his name was and that he was the driver of the truck. I also found out that he had been smoking dope in the cab when the call had come over his radio that the freeway was about to open up again and for him to clear his truck off the road.

He did not look at me with compassion in his eyes. Rather, he had kind of a clinical detachment...almost as if I were something he wanted to scrape from the bottom of his shoe.

"Help me", I said.

The man looked at me and shook his head, "No English", he responded.

"Ayudame" I replied.

The man disappeared and I thought that he was going to fetch help. Moments later I was surprised to hear the truck's engine start. The man was trying to drive off and leave me!

It soon became apparent that my car and his truck were inextricably connected and, after he dragged my car for about 25 feet, the truck stopped and he just ran off into the night.

Not long after he left, I head a soft "whoosh" and I saw an orange glow dancing on the shoulder of the road beside me. My worst fears had come true. I was trapped and alone in a burning car.

I had heard of coyotes who had chewed off their own leg to escape from a trap. Up until that point, I had no idea how the coyote felt. The windshield was cracked and crazed but was still in place. Unfortunately, it was my only possible means of egress. With my shattered right hand, I struck at it repeatedly until it gave way and I was able to push it aside. I fumbled with my seat belt release until I was able to apply enough pressure to free myself. It was excruciating but I imagined that the pain was a pittance compared to what was in store for me if I was unable to escape from my burning car.

With my left forearm. I tried to drag myself over my steering wheel and outside of my car. My legs would not help me. I discovered later why...the engine had compressed the driver's compartment such that the dash had struck my knee and driven my femur through my pelvis, breaking it into four separate sections and ripping the ball from the joint. My femur stuck through my back and into the seat.

As I settled back into the seat and looked at my right hand and left forearm, now ripped and bleeding from their recent desperate battle with the broken windshield, I wondered if I would have the good fortune to bleed to death, or at least lose consciousness before the flames entered where I was.

I remembered reading once of the execution of Joan of Arc. One of her executioners mercifully told her that when the flames reached her face, she should breath them in and she would die very soon afterwards.

I realized that my burning engine was jammed right up against the gas tank of the truck and I told myself that, when it exploded and I saw the wall of flame coming towards me, to breath them in. I prayed that I would have enough courage to do just that.

As I had these morose thoughts, a pair of hands came up to my window and an anxious face poked through my windshield. Someone had finally noticed my wrecked car and had decided to stop and render assistance. I was later to find out just how fortunate I was...my rescuer was an off-duty fire fighter. Perhaps Heavenly Father was not finished with me after all.

He battled the blaze under my car for quite some time. At first, his only weapon was a baby blanket but when that proved futile, he ran forward and found a fire extinguisher in the abandoned truck. It proved sufficient for the task at hand and he was able to extinguish the flames and call for help.

During the hours of torture that followed, every time a movement on my part or on the part of my rescuers would cause more pain to rip though me, I saw in my mind's eye, the face of the driver of that truck...the face of the man who tried to kill me, leave my children fatherless and my wife a widow.

In the emergency room, when they drilled through my shin so that they could set a bar through there and place my leg in traction, I saw his face and my hatred grew.

In the midst of all the trauma room turmoil, an administrator came up and asked if I was Tom Boyce.

"who else would I be?" I asked

"I need you to sign something", she replied.

"Can't my wife sign it?" I asked.

"No", she answered, "It has to be you"

"Look at my hands", I said. "I can't hold a pen"

"Oh my goodness!" she answered "I'm sorry"

I opened my mouth to tell her to get my wife to sign whatever it was and she placed a pen between my teeth and held the clipboard over my head.

As well as I could manage, I signed my name across the form, spit out the pen, and snarled, "What did I just sign?"

It was then that I found out that I was about to go into eighteen hours of surgery and that I had a less than even chance of waking up with my right leg or either one of my hands. I had signed a consent for amputation.

The driver's face came up in my mind and my hatred for him grew even hotter.

For years afterwards, every pain, each time that I struggled to complete a task that should have been easy for a man my age, I thought bitterly of the driver of the truck and hated him. I wanted God's judgement to be poured out upon him and for he to suffer as much as I had.

I'm not certain what the catalyst was for the change but, one day, I realized that this man who I hardly knew and didn't even like was consuming a large portion of my life. Many of my waking thoughts were directed at him and I realized that I had stopped moving forward in any spiritual progression. I had, in fact, started to move the other way. Because of my hatred, I had tied myself to someone I hardly knew.

I knew what I had to do. My prayers for justice became prayers for God to soften my heart. I prayed for the strength to forgive the man who had crippled me. The more I prayed, the more I was able to realize that the man did what he did, not out of malice but out of weakness and fear of the consequences for that weakness.

As the weeks progressed, the more I prayed for forgiveness to enter into my heart, the more I realized that a spirit I had not felt in quite some time, a spirit I had evicted from my heart to make room for my hatred, was beginning to return.

One day, I was asked about the man in the truck and I realized, to my joy, that I had to struggle to remember his name....a name I had dwelt upon with a vehemence for almost two years and yet, God was able to remove him and heal over that wound.

As I pondered that miracle, I realized that my hatred for the man did not cause him any problems or pain or suffering. I realized that the only person I had damaged was myself.

And I realized that forgiveness is a gift that we give to ourselves.