Yancey
I figured I made such a bad attempt at explaining what went on with Philip Yancey as discussed in the sermon, The Spirit Who Comforts that I’d revert to the source itself for more clarity.
Dave: '… Somebody who’s written a lot about this whole subject of pain & the distance of God & the reality of God is Philip Yancey… And yes, he’s written about pain & suffering: Where Is God When It Hurts .. but then something happened earlier this year to Philip Yancey. On February 25th 2007, he was driving his car and he experienced a horrible accident. He describes it this way:'
I was driving alone on a remote highway, curvy but not too hilly at about 65mph. A curve came up suddenly & I turned to the left, perhaps too quickly. As you may know, Ford Explorers are notorious for fish-tailing & this one did. I tried to correct it, but as best as I can reconstruct what happened, my tyre slipped off the edge of the road into the dirt. That started my car rolling over sideways, at least three times & possibly more, & maybe the vehicle stopped right-side up. All the windows were blown out. Skis, boots, laptops, suitcases were strewn over a hundred feet in the dirt. I tried my hands & legs & they worked. I was able to unbuckle the seatbelt & walk away. Within five minutes, a couple of cars stopped & their occupants called for help. I had lots of minor cuts & bruises on my face & limbs but except for a persistent nosebleed, nothing serious - but I did have intense pain in my neck. When the ambulance came, they stripped me into a rigid body-board, taping my head still & immobilising my neck with a neck-brace.
It took almost an hour to reach the town of Allomosa in Southern Colorado. Allamosa has no radiologist on duty over the weekend so all images had to be modemed to Australia where it was Monday morning, a normal workday for interpretation. The images are so dense that a high speed transmittal can take an hour & the diagnosis can take another hour. After the initial batch, the doctor came in with those prefatory words no patient wants to hear: ‘There’s no easy way to say this’.
I’d broken the C3 vertebrae in a comminuted fashion. << I didn't know that word either ... the dictionary says "pulverised".>> The good news was that the break did not occur in the spinal cord column itself; if it had - well, C2 was where Christopher Reeve’s break occurred, so you get the picture of what could happen up there. The spinal cord has three channels. One for the spinal cord & two for the arterial blood supply, which is where my fracture occurred. The bad news was due to the splintered nature of the break, the break may well have penetrated an artery.
'He was left for a few days to think through. It could be that he’d have to go to Australia for the results. All that time, he lay strapped onto that body-board for seven hours. The emergency room was quite busy that day. Yancey says…'
I had plenty of time to think. I’ve done articles on people whose lives had been changed overnight by an accident, which left them paraplegic or quadriplegic. Evidently I had narrowly missed that fate & I mean narrowly - my break was half an inch from the spinal cord. However if my artery was leaking, an artery that feeds the brain or if it grew a clot, there was a fate worse than paralysis awaiting me. As it happened, thank God - yes, thank God - the results were far better than imagined. The MRI revealed no arterial leakage & I was released within half an hour of my wife’s arrival, fitted with a rigid neck-brace that would keep my head from moving for the next ten weeks or so. If all goes well, the vertebrae may well heal back.. on its own, if not I made need surgery further down the road.
'Nine weeks after his car accident, Yancey was invited to speak to the Virginia Tech students in the wake of the tragic campus murders... In the midst of his sermon, Yancey reflected on his own accident & offered these words of insight:'
I’m wearing a neck-brace tonight, because I broke my neck in a car accident. For the first few hours, as I lay strapped to a body-board, medical workers refused to give me pain medication because they needed my response. The doctor kept moving & probing my limbs, asking ‘Does this hurt? Do you feel that?’ The correct answer, the answer that both he & I desperately wanted was ‘Yes. It hurts. I can feel that.’ Each sensation gave proof that my spinal cord had not been severed. Pain offered proof of life, of my connection - a sign that my body remained whole. In grief, love & pain converge. Seung Hui Cho felt no grief as he gunned down your classmates because he felt no love for them. You feel grief because you did have a connection. Some of you had closer ties to the victims but all of you belonged to a body to which they belonged. When the body suffered, you suffered with it. Remember as you cope with the pain, don’t try & numb it - instead acknowledge it as a perception of life & death.
Yancey’s saying that pain actually tells we’re alive. Paul in Romans says pain is inevitable, it’s part of life this side of heaven. That part of heaven, the Holy Spirit, comes here to be with us and to help us.
Dave: '… Somebody who’s written a lot about this whole subject of pain & the distance of God & the reality of God is Philip Yancey… And yes, he’s written about pain & suffering: Where Is God When It Hurts .. but then something happened earlier this year to Philip Yancey. On February 25th 2007, he was driving his car and he experienced a horrible accident. He describes it this way:'
I was driving alone on a remote highway, curvy but not too hilly at about 65mph. A curve came up suddenly & I turned to the left, perhaps too quickly. As you may know, Ford Explorers are notorious for fish-tailing & this one did. I tried to correct it, but as best as I can reconstruct what happened, my tyre slipped off the edge of the road into the dirt. That started my car rolling over sideways, at least three times & possibly more, & maybe the vehicle stopped right-side up. All the windows were blown out. Skis, boots, laptops, suitcases were strewn over a hundred feet in the dirt. I tried my hands & legs & they worked. I was able to unbuckle the seatbelt & walk away. Within five minutes, a couple of cars stopped & their occupants called for help. I had lots of minor cuts & bruises on my face & limbs but except for a persistent nosebleed, nothing serious - but I did have intense pain in my neck. When the ambulance came, they stripped me into a rigid body-board, taping my head still & immobilising my neck with a neck-brace.
It took almost an hour to reach the town of Allomosa in Southern Colorado. Allamosa has no radiologist on duty over the weekend so all images had to be modemed to Australia where it was Monday morning, a normal workday for interpretation. The images are so dense that a high speed transmittal can take an hour & the diagnosis can take another hour. After the initial batch, the doctor came in with those prefatory words no patient wants to hear: ‘There’s no easy way to say this’.
I’d broken the C3 vertebrae in a comminuted fashion. << I didn't know that word either ... the dictionary says "pulverised".>> The good news was that the break did not occur in the spinal cord column itself; if it had - well, C2 was where Christopher Reeve’s break occurred, so you get the picture of what could happen up there. The spinal cord has three channels. One for the spinal cord & two for the arterial blood supply, which is where my fracture occurred. The bad news was due to the splintered nature of the break, the break may well have penetrated an artery.
'He was left for a few days to think through. It could be that he’d have to go to Australia for the results. All that time, he lay strapped onto that body-board for seven hours. The emergency room was quite busy that day. Yancey says…'
I had plenty of time to think. I’ve done articles on people whose lives had been changed overnight by an accident, which left them paraplegic or quadriplegic. Evidently I had narrowly missed that fate & I mean narrowly - my break was half an inch from the spinal cord. However if my artery was leaking, an artery that feeds the brain or if it grew a clot, there was a fate worse than paralysis awaiting me. As it happened, thank God - yes, thank God - the results were far better than imagined. The MRI revealed no arterial leakage & I was released within half an hour of my wife’s arrival, fitted with a rigid neck-brace that would keep my head from moving for the next ten weeks or so. If all goes well, the vertebrae may well heal back.. on its own, if not I made need surgery further down the road.
'Nine weeks after his car accident, Yancey was invited to speak to the Virginia Tech students in the wake of the tragic campus murders... In the midst of his sermon, Yancey reflected on his own accident & offered these words of insight:'
I’m wearing a neck-brace tonight, because I broke my neck in a car accident. For the first few hours, as I lay strapped to a body-board, medical workers refused to give me pain medication because they needed my response. The doctor kept moving & probing my limbs, asking ‘Does this hurt? Do you feel that?’ The correct answer, the answer that both he & I desperately wanted was ‘Yes. It hurts. I can feel that.’ Each sensation gave proof that my spinal cord had not been severed. Pain offered proof of life, of my connection - a sign that my body remained whole. In grief, love & pain converge. Seung Hui Cho felt no grief as he gunned down your classmates because he felt no love for them. You feel grief because you did have a connection. Some of you had closer ties to the victims but all of you belonged to a body to which they belonged. When the body suffered, you suffered with it. Remember as you cope with the pain, don’t try & numb it - instead acknowledge it as a perception of life & death.
Yancey’s saying that pain actually tells we’re alive. Paul in Romans says pain is inevitable, it’s part of life this side of heaven. That part of heaven, the Holy Spirit, comes here to be with us and to help us.