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.

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.

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