Defining Moments

There was a time in my life when I was not so concerned about how I lived or about tomorrow. I loved modifying my car and going street racing. I won some and lost some, but it was all fun. Like my brothers, I loved driving the 20 miles to the coast to surf. Surfing in Galveston, Texas, is not the best; in fact, it is the bunny slope of surfing, but it was fun for guys my age in the mid-to-late 1970s.

I graduated from high school in 1977 with no direction for my life. I had a few interests, photography, working with mechanical things and hanging around my many pets. I started working in the local shipyards on tugboats. I consider those years in the shipyards as my boot camp for life.

In 1978, I lost several friends to accidents. That really affected how I viewed life. I started to see life itself as a gift not to be taken lightly. But these friends were no different from me, so I wondered when my time was going to be up. One day, I was driving home from surfing in Galveston when the freeway traffic suddenly got heavy. Back in those days, sitting in traffic was rare unless there was an accident. I-45 has always been under construction, and those days it was no different. There was, in fact, an accident, a bad one—a flatbed truck backed out onto the freeway from a construction area. A 1968 Camaro that looked exactly like mine, blue with white stripes and had a surfboard on top, just like how I was driving, hit that truck and went under it, killing the driver instantly. As the traffic slowly passed the carnage, I saw how bad the accident was. There was a sheet over the driver's seat and surfboard fragments on the road. It was almost like looking at myself, which was spooky. Later, I heard a rumor that it was me in that wreck. Of course, that rumor did not last long.

When the paper came out a few days later, there was an article about that accident. I learned that the driver was a guy my age who lived in the next town over from me. To this day, I still remember that guy’s name, even though we had never met. Thinking about that accident was sort of like looking in the mirror of what could have been.

Later that same year, a close friend of my brother was killed when he was hit by a train. He had spent his last night on earth at our house. I saw him that morning for the last time. Later that afternoon, I looked out the window to see him drop my brother off; they had been bird hunting. About an hour later, we got the news and ended up at the hospital, where he lived unconscious for a few days before he died.

About a month later, I struck out to the other side of the world, to Europe, to spend time figuring out my life. Over three months at a place called L’Abri, I found my answers as I grew closer to God. I found direction for my life at that point.

As I look back at that time, I can now see how God protected my brothers and me. We did some risky things. Today, how I live is affected by that time in my early life. I strive to walk with God through Jesus Christ every day. I fail all the time, but I always go back through prayer every morning. God has blessed me with a wonderful wife and family, a loving home, lots of pets, and car projects. I still sometimes wonder why I was blessed, and my friends from my early life were not here that long. Only God knows, and one day I will find out. Until then, I live for Christ each day.