When Satan Drops a Car on Your House

We’d gathered around Ashley’s kitchen table, Bibles open and pens ready. Keith, Danica, Alex, the Shoemaker girl (Lydia?), and perhaps a younger sibling or two joined me for a study on Job. Little did we know at that moment, but God had a dramatic sense of irony and timing.

If I were to guess, I’d put this story around 2002 or 2003, which means I’d been doing youth small group study at Hosanna Lutheran Church for several years already. During this era of youth ministry, Hosanna ran out of room and needed an expansion, so for a few years, the youth program was outsourced to a host home, which turned out to be Ashley’s house.

Speaking of houses, I’d also just bought my house in Mapleton—right across from the school. It was super convenient during the school year to step off the curb and be to work steps later, but it was a tad inconvenient to have to drive into Kato for Bible study.

When I teach Bible study, I get a bit animated. (Picture Indiana Jones showing up to your Sunday school class). Beginning with Keith in the late 90s, my youth Bible studies turned into an “Ask Willis” session, and we’d zip around the Bible. Soon other sharp kids joined and it would be a frenzy of questions and answers. 

Way back in my confirmation days, I developed a love for “teaching” the Bible. Back in the 80s, we still had a pretty old school program, and there’d be worksheets and all sorts of “prove it” assignments. So I can remember sitting with Lance, Teresa, Cindy, (and others) and some kids from Chester (Kyle, Jason, and the gal who lived on the cattle farm at the county line). I’d normally finish first and then help others find the answers. For a shy kid, it was fun.

So for the next generation of kids gathered at Ashley’s kitchen table, I again got to share my zeal. The topic of the day happened to be Job. Why dreary Job? Well, these kids would often get right to the heart of the matter and ask probing questions, so it likely began with something to do with dragons (Chapter 41), but by this day, we’d circled back around to the beginning of Job, where God and Satan meet and discuss the righteousness of Job. One of the terrible tests that Job has to endure is the stripping away of all that he has by Satan.

I admit. I was a bit disrespectful when speaking about Satan. He comes off as a whiney, jealous brat in the beginning of this chapter, so when he gets unfettered access to Job, he really makes Job suffer. I emphasized to the kids that it was Satan doing this to Job (rather than God), and then I read, “and suddenly a great wind came from across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead; and I alone have escaped to tell you!”

Just then, the phone rang. 

The timing jolted us after such a heavy verse.

It was my wife.

“Hello?”

“Somebody just hit our house with a car!”

The kids could hear my wife’s voice through the speaker. Jaws dropped. WHAT? They looked at me like my taunting of Satan had caused the moment of deja vu. 

After getting a few more details on the phone, we learned that it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. When I got home, I learned that an impaired driver had been bounced all around Mapleton for a while, and after losing all bearings, drove through the grass of a few lawns before my towering pine trees appeared in front of him. 

He veered.

And wedged his car between the tree and my cement front steps! When the cops arrived, the kid was still trying to drive, engine revving but unable to move. Luckily, my monstrous pine had hardly any damage.

(Lydia) happened to be a Maple River kid, and by the next morning, she’d put the story together. The kid had recently come to Maple River after getting in trouble elsewhere, and she reported that he was pretty much blitzed out of his mind. I honestly don’t remember the kid. I hope he cleaned up.

My steps were broken and needed to be replaced by my insurance. The corner of my porch was slightly damaged when the concrete steps moved. My house was built in the 1920s, and despite having money for insurance, I could not find a mason who could replace the broken block, so we got some expanding foam and viola! Problem solved. 

Two decades later, my house still bears the small scar. 

Even stranger, the windshield glass that got cleaned up after the car was towed…kept coming back! Each spring, when I come around with the lawnmover, there will be new sparkling pieces of glass that emerge from the soft dirt at the base of the tree. There’s a couple pieces right now.

So a few years later, when I modified the student created Freak Bridge/Ghost Behind My Eyes into the novel Cassandra’s Curse, I incorporated the idea of an accident leaving temporal ripples in time. If you’ve ready my blog entry “The Bridge,” you’ll learn how the Dodd Ford Bridge found its way into the literary lore. In my modified telling, the accident that takes the life of Sommer isn’t easily covered up. For a few months? Certainly. But the truth refuses to be buried, and the dark energy summons up justice. My “sensitive” characters encounter those little pieces of glass and realize something bad happened at this very spot.  

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