Three thoughts raced through my mind as I sat in a twice smashed car on the shoulder of the George Washington Parkway during that fateful rush hour:
How exactly was I going to tell my daughter that I’d been in an accident less than 20 miles from the Arlington, Virginia, dealership where I’d picked up her new purchase?
What I needed to prioritize to manage through the mess I found myself in?
How the officer could possibly be suggesting that I would be ticketed?
I’d flown in that morning to Reagan Airport and taken an Uber to the dealership. Katie had done her research on what she wanted her first vehicle to be, what her budget was, and what terms she could get from the Bank of Dad. Together we had visited Lincoln-area dealerships and scoured the internet looking for the right purchase. We’d found it at Alexandria Volkswagen and as Katie was in her finals week at the University of Nebraska, I was chosen to do the pick up and long drive back home.
Everything had gone like clockwork – the flight, the paperwork and purchase – and I was wending my way out of the D.C. metro area and toward my chosen route home. Like many rush hours, traffic was alternating between stopped and streaming and I had eased off the gas pedal as I was coming upon a group of stopped cars waiting to exit the Parkway (which as it turns out is a National Park territory patrolled by National Park Police) and merge onto Interstate 495. Suddenly easing my speed was no longer in play as I was pummeled from behind and catapulted forward towards the row of cars still some distance in front of me. In spite of my best braking efforts, I also tapped the car in front of me. The middle car in a rush hour pancake.
And now, the police officer was telling me that the insurance company of the individual who had hit me was demanding that I be ticketed too as I was the one who hit the car in front of me. “Sir,” I replied, “I don’t think that is fair. I was nowhere near the car ahead of me. Look at the car of the person who hit me. I was catapulted forward. This is not my fault.”
It was not an exaggeration. The front of the car that hit me was completely smashed in, airbag deployed, and fully undrivable. Fortunately, the driver was okay. While the just acquired Tiguan had a fair bit of damage, it was still drivable and clearly had not taken the brunt of the collision.
The officer pondered for a bit and then replied, “You’re right. You didn’t do anything wrong.” No ticket issued. No insurance requirements for me for the car I’d hit. No punishment for where I was guilty only of being in a situation not of my choice.
My situation was not unlike that of many in the human race today. We live in a sinful state, a world far deteriorated from the creation God made. While some of our challenges are those of our doing – our sins of commission that we have created and our sins of omission where we have failed to act as we should – we also have the sins of existing in a sinful state, things we simply aren’t accountable for even though others may want to label us that way.
Both of our daughters have challenges from a genetic disorder called hypophosphatasia, as an example. They did nothing to receive the defective, mutated auto recessive genes from their mother and me. But they have them and they must live with the consequences of that sinful state, that separation from God’s original design.
Most individuals have empathy or at least understanding for my girls. Many provide volumes of advice on treatment approaches, most emanating from profound ignorance and an unexplainable need to make the girls restore or retrofit into some preconceived definition of “normal” they simply can never fit.
My gay friends aren’t so lucky. Neither is my trans friend who finally stopped the torment and started living as she was born. None chose to be the way they are. Most tried aggressively to be otherwise. But somewhere between creation and today, genetics went askew. God may have designed a world of definitive male and female, but by the time the gene pool arrived to the body and soul that is them, things weren’t so clear. Middle cars in a pancake. Leopards who can’t change their spots. Not a fault or choosing of the situation, but somehow still blamed.
I limped my way to the first exit and into downtown Bethesda where I found a hotel, a body shop and a flight home, all covered by the insurance of the one who smacked me. While we do have lingering effects from the accident, no one looks at us with scorn, no one reminds us daily about how our car isn’t as it is supposed to be.
My girls don’t have that option. They live with their sinful state daily. So do my friends. Not in the lives they lead but because of those who feel compelled to judge them because of an inability to accept that we are in a world far removed from Creation which includes humans that may not fit Creation-inspired molds. Yet God – much like the National Park Police Officer that day – may choose to see them as innocent players in an unintended reality. And He might just say to them, just as the officer did for me in my ticketable situation that was not of my choosing, “You’re right. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I do not look at the things people look at. People look at outward appearances. I look at hearts.” – God (1 Samuel 16:7)