Thoughts.com Blogs - Anna Grylls testimony Sunday midnight

Here’s that testimony I promised you – it’s helped me a lot these last nine weeks. I hope you find it worth reading! BTW, this testimony relies on the fact that God WILL ALLOW things that appear "bad" to happen to people who appear "good", for sometimes unknown reasons. I am making no attempt to explain that fact, as it's midnight and I'm not a minister, so please read on at your own discretion!

The night before Annie B drowned, July 28th, we went over to the Mast’s house near Mansfield Ohio for a church youth event. We parked on the side of their driveway, where there’s a small ditch running right beside the driveway. When it came time to leave, it was almost dark, maybe 9pm-ish, and Lael was driving. She tried to reverse out so that the truck would be pointing the correct way down the driveway. But the ditch gets a little deeper as it goes up the drive, and so she couldn’t get out of it, and churned up a few yards of fine Mast grass. She tried again with more gas, but to no avail. Now Bro. and Sis. Douglas were meantime coming down the driveway, and flashed their lights for us to go ahead of them. So Lael gave it another go – more gas, more dirt flying, same result. So, I suggested that she just try to reverse out the way we came in, so we’d be pointing the wrong way up the driveway, and we’d have to go up to the top, turn around and come back down. So she tried it, more dirt, but this time we came out and were free! So, we went up to the top of the driveway, turned and came down.

I know, you’re thinking “Richard, fascinating, but what’s the point?” Here’s the point: We should have been in front of the Douglas’ truck, instead we were behind.

So picture the scene: the Douglas’ F350 is cruising along at 55 on the highway going north from the Mast’s house, and we are following at a respectable distance in our Excursion. Miah and the children are in the back. Unlike pancake-flat Lima, the area around the Mast’s house is quite hilly, and soon we are going down a fairly steep hill, which has an intersection at the bottom of it. Our highway has the right of way, and the intersecting road has a flashing red light. We see a car pull out at the intersection from the left, and I think “surely it can’t be going in front of them! It can’t be going behind them! It’s going to…” SMASH… It hit the Douglas’ just behind the passenger door on the driver’s side, and they span 360 and went off down into a ditch on the right. Unlike the little ditch at the Mast’s house, this was a good 12’ deep, steep ditch. Now Bro. Douglas is a truck driver, and he managed to hold it upright going down that ditch where with most anyone else driving it would certainly have rolled.

We pull up and I dive out and run down to the Douglas’ truck. Everyone is basically fine (they had some whiplash, bruises etc, but wow, if you’d have seen the crash, it was unbelievable that they all walked away). I ran up to the other car, where the three occupants plus dog are also fine.

Everyone’s OK?! It was a horrible accident! How can everyone just walk away?!

We hung out for a couple of hours, and in the end all three of the occupants of the other car were arrested (I forget the details, but they were all intoxicated).

We drive on home, by this time it’s very late, and I’m reflecting on the events. There are times when one of our children will be out of a seatbelt for some reason, and if we’d have been in front of the Douglas’ rather than behind them, it would have been us getting hit, not them. No offense to Lael, but we would have probably rolled, and the accident would have been very horrible.

But that’s not the testimony. That was all preamble. It's coming:

So Lael and I are in our bedroom, and we’re talking about the events of the evening, and how it should have been us, and how likely it was that we would have been facing serious injury or death for any of us. And we talked about what we would do if one of us were looking after the children and one of them was injured or died, and how we would feel and whether we would forgive each other. It was a pretty heavy conversation.

My question to you married folks is, how often do you have that kind of conversation? I’ve never had such a one in my 14 years of marriage.

The next morning (Sunday) several of the children aren’t feeling well (as we got home so so late), so we decide that I will stay home with them, and Lael will take Annie B and Miah to church. But then Lael was ironing her shirt and burned the back of her hand pretty bad, and was in a lot of pain. Anna is always a handful in church anyway, let alone if your hand is burned, so we decided that she would stay home too. This is how I came to be home with all the children.

So about an hour after Lael left for church, I had to call her with the news that, at that moment, her youngest daughter was dead, in the ambulance on the way to St. Rita’s. And all I could think about was that crash the previous night, and the conversation that we’d had in our bedroom the previous evening (not a year before, or even a month before – the very night before). And I thought about how God had prepared both our hearts for this very moment, and how He had preordained this to happen, and how gracious He is, because if things had worked out the night before, it probably would have been a lot more of our children in an ambulance, rushing to hospital.

And that, plus a few other smaller things, tells me that God had His hand in this whole situation, and that it was His will for this to happen. And I can rest in that.

God bless,

Richard