Miracle on 95

We were happy to be taking pictures after such an accident :)

Think HSBC is gonna be in the market for a new trailer??

This is an interesting picture of the window I came out of. Notice the large shard of glass in the upper right hand, but in the lower left corner where I would have come out, there was very little to no glass sticking out.

This picture shows our van tiremarks, and then the marks beside that are from our trailer.

As most of you knowm, about a week and a half ago, I was in an accident. To clear up any misunderstandings or such, I decided (per the prodding of my father) to blog about it so ya'll could get it "straight from the horses mouth" :D

Paul Stetler, Karen Hoffman, Julia Stetler, Luke Brinkmann and myself had just left HSBC on a road trip to Beavertown PA for a youth convention that the Stetler's and Luke would be singing at. It was going to be a roughly 20 hour trip possibly through snow and ice. Little did we know that we would not make it but about 20 minutes.

We were on 95 N near the Stuart exit in the fast lane. Paul was driving at about 70 miles an hour in the 15-passenger Hobe Sound Bible College Van pulling a cargo trailer. I was sitting beside Luke, the movies hadn't started because we still had one more stop to make before we would really be on our way. I remember hearing a loud thundering sort of noise that sounded like we were at a rough spot in the road. The noise went on for about 5 or so seconds at least and Paul was trying to pull the van to the left of the highway when we suddenly veered sharply to the right.

I remember seeing cars out the window as we were going sideways across the highway. Because we had been in the fast lane, we went across two other lanes of traffic. Somewhere about that time, the van began to roll, although we did not necessarily know it. I remember seeing everyone bouncing around roughly in the van. Luke was holding onto me for a while, then was just holding onto my arm. I remember seeing the ground right outside of what had been the window, then feeling myself falling. Because the glass was already out and I didnt have a seatbelt on, I was thrown onto the ground. As soon as I hit the ground, I remember looking up and seeing the van rolling, so I scurried away as quickly as I could, I can't remember if I ran away or crawled away.

When I was standing, it was starting to hit me what had happened. Luke was yelling out the window at me and Paul was calling for Julia. When the others noticed that I had ended up outside, they all ran out to see what had happened. There were only two cars that stopped to be sure we were ok, and one of them left after seeing us all out walking.

As soon as I was thinking that everyone was ok, at least ok enough to be walking around, the only thing I could think of was calling my dad. I think everyone else thought I was slightly in shock because I was walking around with out shoes or socks inthe dirt of the ditch we had landed in (my socks had somehow come off in the midst of the tumbling). I was looking for my phone and finally grabbed someones to call dad. I dont ever remember thinking I had to call 911, I just wanted to talk to Dad or Mom. I got ahold of dad and told him I was ok but we were in an accident. He seemed to take it very well.

Well, there are most of the facts of the accident. Here is the parts that we found out after having time to analyze what had happened.

The loud noise we had heard was the tread coming off of the rear right tire of the van. The tire never did go flat, the tread just separated and with the weight of thetrailer, it acted as a weight to swing the van around to where we had no control. THe trailer must have flipped with us, but it did end up separated from the van. Only the passenger, Karen, had her seat belt on. Neither her nor Paul had any marks at all. Karen had glas chunks in her hair, but not even a cut. Julia had been inthe first bench seat but ended up in the back of the van on top of the wheel well which caused her deep bruising and she also had a few cuts. She did not go to the hospital at the scene but went later for x-rays where they told her of the deep bruising. Luke later found 1 scratch (though I'm convinced that he caused the scratch himself just so that people would believe him that he was ina wreck). I had some cuts on my back, probably from the glass on the window, and some very pretty bruises, but nothing that I could complain about and did not want to go the hospital for. Because of my moms occupation, it was extremely hard for her to believe me when I said I was in a van that rolled twice, came out a window but was fine :)

Obviously because of the severity of the wreck and the lack of injury it was a true miracle. One of the troopers said he had never been to a rollover of that sort where they did not have seat belts on and someone did not leave in a body bag. The ditch we landed in had definately been prepared by God for us to land in. Two weeks ago where we landed had been all trees, but had just been cleared away. Where I landed, there were still some branches and such, but was sand underneath.

Paul found out later that there had been at least 5 different people impressed to pray for us specifically on this road trip. I long to be someone like those five people where God asks them to pray for something they know not of. There were five people at least specifically praying for the five of us in the van.

There is much more to this story, but here is the main points of it :) If anyone has any questions or anything, feel free to leavea comment, I have answered so many questions about it, its not even funny :) I will be having some more pictures put online so that its easier to see what really happened