Freethought-Now

A strong vibration and rumbling noise woke me up.

When I opened my eyes, I was shocked to see that the car I was driving was drifting onto the left shoulder of the road. Panicked, I quickly steered back into the right lane.

I was now wide awake. My heart was pounding. My eyes were frozen open. My hands gripped the steering wheel like a vice.

In the station wagon with me were six or seven young people, dozing or oblivious to what had just happened.

It was the summer of 1968. I had just turned 19, and I was one of the team leaders taking high-school aspiring missionaries to spread the love of Jesus across Mexico with the Frank Gonzales Evangelistic Association.

An hour earlier, we had left Tampico, on the Gulf of Mexico, where we sang and preached in a couple of churches. I was driving the team west on a two-lane rural highway on a muggy afternoon, headed for another city in need of the Gospel. We were all tired after weeks of crisscrossing the country. Our blue Chevy did not have air conditioning. The swishing of humid air through the open windows, the lazy buzzing of insects and the whirring of tires had lulled me to sleep.

I was horrified. What if there had been an approaching vehicle in the other lane? Or a parked car on the shoulder? Or a tree or utility pole or ditch? I might never have known what happened.

I could not sleep for a day or two after that. I felt like I was injected with a month’s supply of caffeine.

I never told anyone about it.

Over the years, I have often thought about those few seconds. Who might have died? If there had been any injured survivors, what might their futures have been like? How many life trajectories would have been scarred or shattered? What families or children or grandchildren would not exist today?

I think about my own children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and my life’s work over the six decades since that brief instant. My music would be uncomposed and unperformed, my books unwritten. My wife Annie Laurie and my friends would have never known about me.

Pushing myself to the point of exhaustion was irresponsible. If I had survived, I would have had to live with the shame that the tragedy was my fault. That — and a lax ministry that sometimes put providence over prudence.

The parents of those students had all prayed, I am sure, for God’s protection before sending their son or daughter off on a wild summer-long missionary journey. They had trusted me with their care. They didn’t know that their child would be hurtling down a foreign highway in a vehicle driven by a sleeping teenager. If any of them had later heard about our brush with death, I’m sure they would have said, “Praise God for watching over my child!”

But it wasn’t God who jarred me back into consciousness. It was the shoulder of the road. Did God keep a truck from approaching? Did he say, “I see Dan is falling asleep, but I’ll make sure it happens where there are no obstacles”? Why didn’t he keep me awake in the first place? Or warn me to pull over and rest?

I later worked briefly with Youth With a Mission (YWAM), a worldwide Christian missionary organization. Some of my friends were with the mission for many years. In 2024, 11 missionaries from the outfit, including the team leader, were killed and another eight injured in Tanzania when a construction truck lost its brakes and smashed into one of their mini-school buses. The tragic accident involved four motor vehicles with a total of 25 deaths and 21 injured. I have no doubt that the mission trip had been “protected” by hundreds of prayers, not just by family members but by the many faithful members of that global ministry.

It should be obvious that prayer is irrelevant. What happened was pure luck — bad for them, good for me. Did God keep me alive so I could become an atheist emissary? Did he not want the missionaries who died in Tanzania to continue proselytizing? Does he remember that he said to his followers, “All things whatsoever you shall ask in prayer believing you shall receive”? Or does he just roll the dice to learn whose prayers he will ignore?

I no longer believe in God, of course. But if he does exist, he’s asleep at the wheel.

Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

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