When I think in my mind about the actual CLOSEST I ever came to death I think of the one Spring morning in 2000 (I know this because I moved to Manhattan from Brooklyn in late 1999) when I was heading for the A-C-E subway in Hell's Kitchen as usual from my apartment to be at work by 9 a.m.
I got the green light and walk signal as I was approaching my corner (48th and 10th) and stepped off the sidewalk curb in full stride just as a city garbage truck barreled around the corner only inches away from my forward-thrusting body! I mean, it was inches!
So this became my SECOND encounter with a massive moving vehicle, the first being when the city bus sideswiped me that rainy morning I was riding my bicycle to a media law exam on High Street on the Ohio State campus.
The garbage truck near-calamity (as in I would have been like Mr. Bill from Saturday Night Live crying, "Ohh, noooo!" while I was flattened to a crisp) has come up in my head many times over the years, reminding me in my unhappy times that I should be grateful I'm even still alive.
To get back to the question, "Did Lisa hit the bus or did the bus hit Lisa?", it has to do with the front-page article my colleagues at the Lantern put together on my bus accident.
There was no byline, meaning it was a staff report, and in it, very high up near the top of the story, they quoted a woman sitting in the bus who said from what she could tell I hit the bus!
I was still in the hospital bed when I read this (the Lantern was published every weekday morning) and remember being distraught, thinking, "How absurd!!!!"
First off, the injury to my elbow certainly proved otherwise. Secondly, how can you really gauge what happened when you're sitting on the bus looking out the window on a dreary, rainy morning?!
The article did state that others thought the bus hit me but it was a lamely reported story from my perspective, and I know there were staffers who didn't care for what I was writing on the opinion page as a conservative political columnist.
Funny thing was, in the corner on my room, as I read the article, was a big bunch of multi-colored balloons sent with a "Get Well" card from the Lantern.
The proof of the pudding is I was eventually awarded a settlement from COTA a few years later--sizeable enough that I used it to purchase a used candy-apple-red stick-shift Chevy Z24 Cavalier with a moon top.
One of the memories I love most is when I went into a campus bike shop months after the accident and the employees realized one way or another that I was the cyclist hit by the city bus and they told me, and I'm paraphrasing, "Your story sure made the rounds with us campus cyclists--that was big!"
Another fond memory was how my devoted mother would drive an hour-and-a-half from Loudonville down to Columbus every other day for the first week or so after the surgery to help me take a shower and wash my hair and put on clothes, etc., etc. at the off-campus house I rented with two other girls on Patterson Avenue.
We really had a special bonding during that time and it gave my mom a real up-close look into campus life, something she never enjoyed as a commuter-only student at the University of Akron in her hometown.
(note: I still have more Ohio State thoughts to come and, in meantime, will have new article tomorrow)
*****
“God’s made you a part of something that before the foundation of the world He planned to do and He’s already formed it and fitted you into it.
"It’s His design and you grow in that. If you’re going to bring that design into the reality of your experience, you appropriate it by faith. The reality is that’s the reality," says Richard Jordan.
“Jesus Christ came to live His life fully in you and Paul says, ‘Wake up, dudes, don’t you know that?!’ If God came to dwell in you, how should you live?! Wake up! If you’ve got an asset like THAT, what should you do?! USE IT!
“God’s in you to live HIS life. Now, in I Corinthians 6, that’s talking about you as an individual. His purpose in you personally is to make your life a vehicle, a vessel; that is, a living manifestation of the one who inhabits you.
“You remember how Paul, in Philippians 1:20, says, ‘According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.’
“What he’s saying is that when people would see him, even in the extremity of death, they would see that the one he treasured and was of the greatest magnitude to him was Jesus Christ, and when he made choices, he made them based upon what God’s Word said. When he took actions, it was based upon what God wanted done.
“The way sin doesn’t run your life is you’re not under the law; you’re not focusing on your performance. You’re under grace, looking at who God has made you in His Son.
*****
“I have a friend who doesn’t like how a song goes, ‘He set me free.’ He says you need to sing, ‘He made me free.’ That’s a technicality, but he’s right. God doesn’t just set you free; He MADE you something you weren’t before. You’re free!
“Paul says in I Corinthians 7:22, [22] For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord's freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ's servant.’ You’re the Lord’s freeman! That’s the reality, and your faith can believe that.
“Spiritual growth is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to your own.
“Preachers spend time trying to get people to do more and more--try harder, live more radically for God, change your life, etc.—and the result is really stunted spiritual growth because you fix your eyes on yourself and you can’t do it.
“It’s not going to be you. And when you’re in those moments where it’s you, and you come to the conclusion, ‘I can’t do it,’ that’s good! Because you know where to go to the One who can.
“Most of the thinking about Christian living and sanctification is really just terribly narcissistic. It’s thinking, ‘How we doing? Am I doing it right? Am I not doing it right?’
“We ponder our spiritual failures and we brood over our spiritual successes and it’s all about us. The more you focus on your need to be better, the worse you really get. You wind up becoming neurotic and self-absorbed and all of life’s about you.
“When you’re possessed with your performance, instead of Christ’s performance--when you spend your time thinking about what YOU’RE doing, instead of what HE’S doing, well, then, what are you going to do but get worse?! That hinders your spiritual growth because it makes you increasingly self-centered.
“Sanctification, or set-apart living, is forgetting about yourself: ‘It’s not me! It’s Christ!’ The grace of God works--is manifested, put on display--in your minuses, not your pluses. It’s in your weaknesses, not your strengths. Now, that’s the opposite of religion. Religion says, ‘YOU got to make it, YOU got to create it , or you’re going to fail.’