12/27/2025
The Long Way Home
What follows is a true account of events that unfolded this evening of December 26, 2025.
The car ahead of us drifted left, just enough to catch my eye.
At first it looked like distraction, a tire grazing the white line, a small mistake waiting for correction. Then the engine seemed to surge. I never saw brake lights. The car did not slow. It leaned into the error, crossed oncoming traffic in a blur of motion, jumped the curb, and vanished over the edge of an Ozark hillside so steep it swallowed the whole car and sound at once.
I hit the brakes hard enough to jolt the grandkid quiet. My wife’s breath caught. Someone asked a question that never reached the end of the sentence.
My phone was already in my hand. “911,” I said, my voice steady in a way that surprised me as I pulled up to the drop off. Below us, a horn began to scream. Many long blasts, raw and panicked, echoing up through cedar and rock like a wound crying out.
My wife leaned forward, bracing herself against the guardrail. “It’s overturned,” she said.
The word settled into my chest like a stone.
I told the dispatcher what I feared and started down the hill. Gravel slid under my shoes. Brush tore at my legs. The slope fought every step, sharp with loose rock and winter-bare roots. The car lay sideways against the hillside, metal folded and torn, glass shattered except for the windshield, which held in a spiderweb of cracks, safety film stretched tight as skin pulled over bone.
My daughter was already there, kneeling beside the wreck, speaking gently through the broken window. Inside sat an elderly man, folded by gravity, eyes unfocused, breath shallow. I leaned close enough for him to hear me.
“Help is coming,” I said. “Sit tight. You’re not alone.”
He did not answer. His hand rested against the glass. A dark wedding band caught my notice, flashed once, then dulled as my mind shifted.
Syd and I prayed where we stood. Words shaped by urgency, stripped of polish I am sure. Protection. Mercy. Strength for bones and organs that should have failed and somehow had not. The hill absorbed our voices, but prayer does not require volume. It requires presence.
I climbed back up to flag the emergency vehicles. The hill resisted me like a living thing. My calves burned. My hands grabbed at scrub oak and exposed roots. Each step scraped and slipped until I hauled myself over the edge, breath loud, heart pounding.
Sirens were already threading through traffic. Red and blue lights cut across the trees and concrete. EMTs moved with fast, practiced precision. A saw whined to life. Commands bounced between uniforms.
That is when I noticed the woman standing near the guardrail.
She stood a few steps back from the concrete wall, arms wrapped tight around her middle, body rocking slightly, as if the ground beneath her had not finished moving. Her eyes stayed fixed on the place where the car had flown past her moments earlier.
She told me she had been sitting on that wall. The car came at her without warning. She saw the driver’s face through the windshield. Wide eyes. Terror locked in place. A fraction of a second stretched thin enough to see every detail. She stepped back just in time.
Her body stood upright. Her hands shook hard enough to rattle the zipper of her coat.
I asked her name. I will leave it here, unnamed, as she stood then, a soul still vibrating from the nearness of death. I asked if she believed in God. She nodded quickly, as if agreement itself might anchor her.
“I’m going to pray for you,” I said.
Right there. Right then. Words fell quietly, steady and close. Her breathing slowed. Her shoulders dropped. The shaking softened, not gone, but gentler, like wind easing after a hard gust.
She worried about getting home. I told her Joy and I would take her. She hesitated, then nodded and sat down again as the EMT took her blood pressure.
The hillside became a place of motion and sound. Steel screamed as it gave way. Radios crackled. Boots slid on rock. I asked one of the officers for the driver’s name. I wanted to visit him later. Call him something more personal than “the man in the wreck.” They could not tell me. That was fine. God keeps names long before we ever learn them.
I heard the EMTs talking, voices tight with calculation. How to get a board up that hill. How to lift a body that should not be moved. How to prepare for what age and gravity usually demand.
Then another voice cut through, edged with disbelief.
“He’s standing.”
I turned in time to see them throw a rope down the hill. Two men braced themselves at the top. The elderly driver reached up, grasped the rope, and began to climb. Step by careful step. Bent. Shaken. Alive beyond expectation. His shoes scraped against rock. His hands clenched tight. He walked up that hill under his own power, assisted, upright, stubbornly present.
My heart hammered. I stood there watching mercy take a shape I did not expect.
They loaded him into the ambulance and headed toward Springfield, lights flashing against the trees. The horn had finally gone silent.
We drove.
The woman in the back seat stared out the window, hands tucked into the sleeves of her coat. Cigarette smoke clung faintly to her clothes, mixed with something sweet and cheap, vanilla trying to cover years of wear.
She spoke in pieces at first. Addiction. Alcohol. Drugs that promised escape and delivered chains. A childhood shaped by harm. Family ties severed clean by pain. A boyfriend behind bars. Each sentence came out flat, practiced, as if she had learned how to survive by telling her story without feeling it.
Then the questions started. They sounded urgent. Why did this happen. Why did she live. Why did I stop. Why did we meet.
I pulled the car over.
Gravel crunched under the tires. I turned in my seat and looked at her. Her eyes finally left the road and met mine. They held fear and something else beneath it. Hope, maybe, handled carefully.
I spoke of Christ as a living Savior who steps into wreckage. As a Person who meets people when metal is twisted and hearts are split open. I spoke of the cross as rescue. Of grace that runs toward broken people instead of away from them. Of repentance as a turning that leads somewhere solid. Of faith as trust placed in One who already knows the whole story and still calls.
The car sat quiet. Her hands stopped shaking. She listened, really listened, as if every word carried weight.
“This doesn’t feel like an accident,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I agree,” I told her.
The road carried us the rest of the way. When we reached her place, she lingered at the door, hand resting on the handle. She said she would think about what she had heard. Joy gave her my number.
Joy and I sat there for a moment after she went inside. The echo of the horn still rang in my ears. The image of an old man climbing a hill replayed behind my eyes.
God shows up along roadsides. He moves through twisted metal and frightened prayers. He places people where they need to be, sometimes at the edge of a steep hill, sometimes in the back seat of a car, sometimes both.
Tomorrow, I will carry a Bible to a doorstep. Gravel will crunch under my boots. A porch light will spill weak yellow onto winter ground. A door will open. Words will be spoken again.
Tonight reminded me that obedience often arrives as interruption, that calling comes without warning, that mercy takes flesh in ordinary places. The story did not end when the ambulance disappeared down the road. It continues, one step at a time, written by a God who never wastes a moment and never misses His mark.
