Never Safe, Always Safe: The Paradox of God’s Providence

Years ago my wife was hit in the side of her car by a truck driver at an intersection. We call that an accident. I don’t think the truck driver with malice aforethought intended in his mind to ram into the side of my wife’s car with his truck. He didn’t mean to do it. And since he didn’t mean it, and my wife didn’t mean it, and no one else apparently meant it, we call it an accident. But
we still have to ask the question, Where was God in all of it? Where was God in the accidents you have experienced in your life?

On September 22, 1993, my wife and I were involved in an unforgettable accident. We were traveling by train from Memphis to Orlando, with a stopover in New Orleans. The previous evening, we boarded a train named the Sunset Limited in New Orleans. We entered the last car in the sleeping compartment and retired for the night, comfortable, peaceful, and assuming that on the morrow we would reach our destination and be home. But everything changed without warning. At three in the morning, I awoke flying through the air, a human projectile experiencing the law of inertia. The train had crashed while it was going seventy miles an hour. Now, when you are in a vehicle that is going seventy miles an hour, and it stops, you continue to go seventy miles an hour. I was in a state of motion. And I was going to stay in motion until something stopped that motion, and what stopped that motion was the wall. I bounced off the wall in the pitch dark amid the screeching noise of metal against metal. I realized we were in the middle of a wreck. But in the intensity of the moment, the first thought that came into my mind was “Is my wife all right?” And she had the same thought about me. We both cried out to each other in the dark, “Are you all right, honey?” She assured me that she was fine and I assured her that I was fine, and then our brief conversation was interrupted by the screams of a woman in the next compartment. She was screaming that she was bleeding and couldn’t get out of her room.

The cabin steward banged on my door and on her door, trying to determine how many people were injured. I went into the hallway and helped the cabin steward get the woman’s door open. She was not fatally injured, but she was very frightened. At that point, my assumptions changed. When we first crashed, I assumed that we had been involved in an accident at a crossroad, that the train had hit a vehicle. But as I walked down the hall and looked out the window, I saw a gigantic ball of flame rising about seventy-five feet in the air outside my window.

At that point, I thought we must have hit a tanker truck. I still wasn’t sure what was going on. We were on the second floor of a double-decker train. People climbed down the stairwell and out the back of the train. We hurried away from the back of the train, away from flames that were coming in our direction. After a few moments, I circled around and came back toward the back of the train to see what was going on. I could see that there was a searchlight of some kind; later I learned it was the searchlight of a boat. The boat had actually caused the accident by hitting the railroad bridge.

Against a backdrop of flame and fog, I could see two train cars in the water. As I stood there and watched, suddenly a ball of fire went through one train car and out the empty end of it, like fire in a funnel. I thought, “If there’s anybody still on that car, they have no hope.” What I didn’t know was that underneath that car was another car submerged on the bottom of the river, where almost no one had survived.

We then sat down on the tracks and huddled with groups of people, a large number of whom had been cast into the water by the train wreck and had managed to swim to shore or were rescued by people on the riverbanks. We all tried to help one another get comfortable as we waited for rescue. But the accident had taken place in the middle of a remote part of Alabama. There was no access to the site by car. There were no roads. The only way in was by rail, and in this case it was a single track, not a double track. The only access was by air or by water.

We began to hear the sounds of a helicopter, but it couldn’t land because the flames were so high and intense. A tugboat captain and his crew rescued about seventeen people from the water. But we were told to remain where we were. Finally a train approached us from the rear, and we experienced a sense of “we’re going to be rescued.”

But the train stopped and just sat, and eventually it backed up and left, and we had no idea why. We later learned that it was a freight train. And when it came upon the accident, it radioed back to Mobile. The people in Mobile already knew from the Coast Guard messages that there had been an accident, but they didn’t know the severity of it. They had assembled all their rescue crews in Mobile, prepared the hospitals, gone into their catastrophe alert program, and assembled four hundred rescue people on a train to bring them to the site. But they couldn’t bring the train in because the freight train was blocking the tracks. So they had to wait for the freight train to back up all the way to Mobile before they could send the rescue train in. Between the time of the accident and the time the rescue train arrived, three hours had passed.

When the rescue train came, triage was implemented. The most severely injured went to the closest car, and those who were safe and relatively unhurt walked along the sharp rocks of the roadbed and went to the final car on the train. That’s what my wife and I did. Vesta and I boarded the last car in the train. I don’t know how many people were in that car, but we were the people who were the least injured. We rode to Mobile, which took another hour. And during that
time, two passengers on our car had heart attacks from the trauma.

We heard story after story from other passengers about their experiences, but there was no panic. There was no mob violence. People were working together in this situation. We knew that there had to be some fatalities, but nobody knew that this accident was the worst accident in the history of Amtrak, that this accident killed more people than all other fatal incidents in the history of Amtrak combined.

We didn’t really realize that until we got to Mobile. The sun was just now coming up, and as we looked out, we saw more than a hundred ambulances gathered to meet us.

Again, more triage took place. We were put on a bus that would take us to the farthest hospital because we were the least injured. Again, it took another hour before we got to that destination. When we arrived in front of the hospital, we were amazed at the number of people there to meet us.

I couldn’t help but notice the name of the hospital: Providence Hospital. There we were treated with great tenderness, compassion, and kindness.

When I was finally able to call our family at home, I felt like Peter coming to the door where the people had been praying for him. They shut the door in his face because they thought it was Peter’s ghost. When I called, I discovered one of our vice presidents and my son had already left for the airport to fly to Mobile, not knowing whether they were coming for bodies or to bring us home.

We met them at the Mobile airport and returned home. The accident made national news, and I was besieged by newspaper reporters and television people who wanted to interview me.

But when I reflected on everything afterward, the thing that struck me was the questions people asked me. They asked me many silly questions. But the one that they asked most frequently was “Why do you suppose you were so lucky? Why do you think your life was spared and forty-seven other people’s lives were taken? Don’t you really feel lucky?”

I answered: “No, I don’t feel particularly lucky. Maybe I would have been lucky if I had missed the train. But I don’t consider these kinds of events matters of luck. I know that my life was in the hands of God.”

“But weren’t the other people’s lives in the hands of God?” I was asked. “Absolutely, they were.”

I heard all kinds of stories later. I heard the story of one couple who met some friends in New Orleans. They were in the sleeping car, but their friends did not have a ticket for the sleeping car. And so the couple moved out of the sleeping car and went forward into one of the other cars, and they perished. How lucky is that?

“Why did you live and somebody else didn’t?” I was asked. I said: “I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow God will take my life. He could have taken it tonight. I know that that night was not my time in the providence of God to die, but it was the time for other people to die.” That train rushing at seventy miles an hour, out of control once the bridge collapsed and there was no longer any track for it to run on, was not out of the control of God. The engineer had no control. The tugboat captain had no control. The passengers had no control. But the hand of God was there.

As hard as it is for us to deal with tragedy, it is comforting to know that my life and my death are in God’s hands. Somebody asked me, “What did you learn about this theologically?” I said: “I could give you a pious-sounding statement, but I really didn’t learn anything because I already knew that my life was in the hands of the providence of God. I already believed in the providence of God before this accident took place. Now, I learned something existentially. I learned something experientially. My doctrine was confirmed through the reality of this situation.”

What I found out is that you are never safe. I wasn’t safe when I thought I was safe. But I also found out, paradoxically, though not contradictorily, that I am always safe. That is to say, from a human perspective, we are never really safe, but from a divine perspective, if your life is in the hands of God, you are always in a situation of perfect safety. Even those who perished, perished by the hand of God safely. My ultimate security and safety do not rest in the plans and provisions I make for this world, but they rest in the provisions of God. And if it’s God’s provision that my life is to end, I would much rather understand that it’s in His hands rather than assume that I am a victim of blind impersonal forces over which neither God nor man has any control.

I don’t mean that God reached out from heaven, grabbed that train, and threw it off the bridge and into the water. I don’t mean anything as crass as that. But if we believe in God, then we have to believe that the invisible hand ofGod was sovereignly involved in the Alabama train wreck because God’s providence extends where human roads don’t. It extends into the night. It extends into the bayou. It extends into the darkness. It extends into the flame. It extends into the wreck. It extends into the wreck of your life, and it extends into every accident you’ve ever experienced, because we believe that God is a God of providence.

When a child asks, “Why does such and such happen?” we give the brief answer “Because.” When we say “because,” we are saying that there is something that produced this result. There is a cause.

Though there is such a thing as cause and effect in the world, all power ultimately rests with God. God is the supreme cause of everything that comes to pass. He doesn’t necessarily do it directly or immediately. He may, and often does, work through causes that are found in this world, but His sovereignty extends over all things, and, ultimately, there is no such thing as an accident.

Now, causes are important for us. We need to know why the grass grows and why the grass dies. We go to doctors to find out what’s causing our pain and illness. But we tend to look at secondary causes. The Christian needs to go deeper and look behind the temporal causes of this world and see the invisible hand of God’s providence.