A horrible stupid mistake. One absent minded decision put a man in the hospital, totaled my husband’s car, and broke a city street light. I walked away with bruises and a concussion and a man I don't know and never saw was taken away in an ambulance. And it was my fault. I can’t go back and do it differently. I can’t take his place no matter how much I wish I could. A firefighter tried to lessen my obvious guilt and worry for the man they’d just removed from the truck that had smashed into a street pole by informing me, “Looks like he’s broken his leg, nothing life threatening.” The man screamed in pain as a team of men placed him on board and pulled him out of the truck. What overwhelming guilt. Over the next seven days I struggled. I was in physical pain, suffering from PTS, and wrecked with guilt and shame. I distracted myself by watching feel-good upbeat movies because every idle moment resulted in replaying getting hit head on by a 55 mph truck over and over in my head. 
One night, I had fallen asleep watching one of these movies, my husband came to bed later and began watching an action movie. At some point in the movie a car honked, tires shrieked, and I shot up screaming in panic. “You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine,” I tried telling myself but I couldn’t stay in bed. I got up and went to the living room and just sobbed and sobbed. I’ve never experienced trauma to this degree. I hope I never do again. I kept clinging to truth, ‘God’s going to teach me something through this.’ But the reality was that I was paralyzed where I was by guilt and shame. I felt like I deserved it too. I needed to punish myself. I fretted over the man wondering how he was. I tried to get any sort of update on the man by the way of an officer who had been on the scene and my insurance company but they knew nothing. Each day got a little better; a little. By day six, I had to tell myself ‘he’s on the road to recovery now. He’s probably home, casted, and healing physically and trying to move past the trauma as I was minus, the guilt and shame. I hoped he wasn’t angry at me; I hoped he wasn’t bitter but I believed he probably was because I deserved it. A war was raging in me. A war between horrific shaming myself and recognizing I am human and all accidents are caused by someone making a mistake. I felt like I was winning the war on my shame and getting to a pretty good place all things considering, and then day seven from the wreck rolled around. I received a call about 1:00 in the afternoon. My daughter had had speech therapy so I was out when my insurance company called. I picked it up thinking it was about our car and the man on the other end began informing me without any hesitation, “the man involved in the accident suffered two broken bones in his leg requiring surgery on them and pins needing to be put in them, a broken pelvis, and two broken vertebrae. He is still in the hospital. His vertebrates may require surgery as well and then he has a long road of therapy ahead of him.” I wanted to let the grief I had for this man drown me. All I could muster out was, “is he…or…is there he a risk for paralysis?” “No,” he replied. “Can you please call my husband and tell him all this? I just can’t process it all.” I hung up and thought, ‘you’ve got to hold it together. You have to get from here to home so hold it together.’ I loaded my littles up and headed home. My husband began texting and calling me frantically (naturally concerned for what all I was undoubtedly struggling with) but I knew if I stopped to text or answered the call I would lose it and I couldn’t lose it. I had to get home. I just had to make it home. As I pulled up in the drive, my brother’s car was parked out front. He had come to get all the kids to take them bowling. ‘Ok,’ I told myself, ‘you made it home now just hold it together until they leave.’ I entered the house. Said hi as best I could, went to put my purse and shoes away and just couldn’t hold it in any longer. The grief, sadness and guilt came rushing over me and I couldn’t hold back the tears. I went out into the living room and muttered the words to my bother- something about “I can’t…. can you just get them out yourself?” He said, “yep.” And I retreated to my bedroom and let it all swallow me up. I felt crushed by the weight of the guilt. It was excruciating. I couldn’t take it. I felt a weight on me that I’ve never felt before. Between the sobs all I could say over and over is “Jesus. Jesus, it’s too much, Jesus. It’s too much, Jesus.” Over and over. After a few minutes of heart wrenching crying, a fellow homeschool mom/friend popped into my head. Her husband had been the victim of an even worse accident four years ago. If I couldn’t connect with the victim from my accident, at least I couldn’t connect with a victim. I called her, not expecting her to answer but she did. “I’m not really sure why I’m calling you,” sounding obviously upset, “you just popped into my head and I picked up the phone and called…” I began telling her about the wreck that had happened, what I had been experiencing, and where I was at now. She shared a lot of comforting words with me. The two things that I really took away were, “you have to take all the guilt and shame and lay it down at the foot of the cross. You have to rest in His grace,” and “we were advised and told that we can never make contact with the kid who hit my husband. We know who he is and where he lives but we can’t got to him and tell him that that wreck was the best thing that ever happened to us, for my husband. That we forgive him and it’s ok.”As we hung I began processing everything she said and talking to God. “God, if the roles just could’ve been reversed…you know me…I could’ve shown that man Jesus. I would’ve forgiven him, I would have told him ‘accidents happen and it’s ok; I’m not angry at you. I would’ve shown him Jesus. I would’ve encouraged him to come visit me in the hospital and loved on him.”
“I know that,” God said to me. “But I had things to teach you through this.”
The rest of that afternoon and evening, I can’t even write words to describe it. I just began taking every thought surrounding the accident captive and surrendering it to the cross. A moment by moment war with every single thought.
The next morning, I had more peace than I had and up to that point. My friends’ words still pressing on me. 'Lay it at the cross, let his grace be enough.' I recall praying, in response to her sharing they were not allowed to talk to the man, “OK, Lord. Even if I never know for the rest of my life how he’s doing, I will trust that You are working good in that man and use everything as a means to draw us both closer to You. I trust You. I ask that that man come to a place of forgiveness, not for my sake but because I know what a cancer of the soul bitterness, anger, and unforgiveness are. Free him from that and use this for Your glory in his life.”
I went to counseling that morning with Shane by my side and I felt like I was in a peaceful place by this point. There was still grief but I was free from shame. When I shared everything through the tears, we all went before God and the counselor had me ask Him, “God, what do you want me to know in this?” I listened. “MY grace needs to be enough,” He said. I took that as enough in everything, not just this accident, but every aspect of your life. “You’ve been struggling with guilt and shaming yourself- you're harder on yourself more than anyone else is on you and you’ve been asking Me why that is and begging, for years, to help you stop doing that.”
...Then the Spirit placed this thought in my head: it’s like when you pray for patience. God doesn’t give you patience, He gives you opportunities to practice patience. I felt God say in that moment “You want to be freed from self shaming? Well child of mine, here you go. Here’s something so overwhelmingly hard to carry on your shoulders- the weight of it will crush you to the point of surrender- then you will know my grace and your shame will be no more. My grace needs to be enough.” There is peace. There is peace from resting in the faith and knowledge of God’s promise that He is working His will in that man’s life and there is peace in the freedom that comes in surrendering EVERYTHING to the cross. The grief is still there, but trauma is still there, but I am free from shame. I am free from guilt. I am free when I surrender it all.
Opening myself up to fully experience His grace has allowed me to extended this same grace He gives me, with gentleness, patience, love to all others when they "fall short" and to recognize that we all grow and learn at different times and in different areas than others. God has been patient with me as I grow at my own pace. He has been gracious to me in lovingly wooing me to Himself, by speaking to me through Holy Spirit many many times, by being the perfect Father and counselor I need. He has loved me in answering even the quietest of prayers in my heart. Prayers, wishes really, that I had whispered to Him in my heart on occasion and as He answered those hopes, hearing Him say, "I do this because I love you." I hear Him in the hardest times of life when I don't think I can take much more, "I do this because I love you." It hurts, I hate it, I wish those hard moments would be taken away but I know it's producing something in me that He knows would only come to light by allowing those hard times to happen and I trust it fully, because His grace is enough. Recognizing that God calls me to be an ambassador of Jesus to all those around me and that my life could point and even woo people to Him if I choose to fully receive His grace and to fully, without condition, extend that same grace to others who are no more worthy than I was to receive it myself. His grace is enough.
