A couple of weeks ago, I had to run by our internet provider’s store, and the guy who came over to help me with a transaction sported this tattoo. I had to ask, and, without hesitation, he recounted a car accident that almost took his life. He explained that the ink on his forearm specified both the date (in Roman numerals, June 10 or October 6—I forget which one), 2016 and the location (in precise terms of latitude and longitude, somewhere in or around Murfreesboro, Tennessee). As I recall, the crash involved a college acquaintance and a party that inebriated the guy who hit him.

I was reminded of this conversation when I overheard another one this past week. The question in play was, “Would you rather know today the time or the means of your death?” The consensus went with the manner, not the date, but one answered, “The means, unless it was drowning.” Then, just yesterday, I read that former SNL cast member, Gloria Jackson (she a Christian) had been given around three years to live. She reported that the doctors couldn’t operate on a growth that will constrict her windpipe, effecting suffocation. Nevertheless, she’s thanking God for the life she’s lived and is at peace with his provision, both on earth and beyond. So, she’s working with at least a provisional sense of both time and means. And yes, I think of Jesus, who knew from the founding of the earth that he would die a horrible death “in the fullness of time.” Yet, he persevered for our sakes.

That being said, this Tennessee clerk with the tattoos is dealing with another event—a near miss in the past. As Winston Churchill once put it, “Nothing in life is quite as exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” And, of course, we’ve heard a range of variations in the form of testimony, wherein people speak of their life-changing escape from an airplane crash, the report that their cancer is in remission, or deliverance from a hostage situation. A new perspective on life takes over and things once thought momentous seem trivial, and other items once counted trivial seem surpassingly compelling; new projects or deeper commitment to old projects; pursuit of new answers, with old answers and, indeed, old questions fading away. first-time recognition of the wisdom in counsel once marginalized or ignored.

I wish I’d had occasion to follow up, but customers were waiting, and we were about to leave town for a season (hence, the need to make adjustments in our internet setup). With what little I picked up from our brief exchange, I didn’t get the sense that he’d let the wreck push him closer to God in Christ. And, so, I ventured a word on the possibility that this close brush with death/mortality was a prompt to consider his eternal destiny. And, with that, I gave him my card with a short statement of the gospel on the back.

Of course, his narrative nudged me to recall my own close calls. I think of the time my dad snatched me out of a rushing stream on an East Tennessee roadside where we’ll pulled over for a rest. As a child, I’d walked down to the water, lost my footing in the current, and found myself gasping for air as the torrent took me down. But, in a blink, my father’s (and yes, my Father’s) strong hand grasped me and pulled me up to safety. I think I was five at the time.

And then there was late Sunday afternoon when I was driving back to Wheaton after a National Guard exercise at Fort Sheridan on Chicago’s North Shore. I was headed south in the right lane on a big Chicagoland expressway, probably the “tri-state,” when a fellow to my far left suddenly spotted his exit and veered across several  lanes, including mine, to leave the freeway. I think God may have suspended the laws of physics at that moment and spot, allowing metal to pass unscathed through metal so that the back of his car and the front of mine occupied the same spatial-temporal coordinates simultaneously. I have no idea how he missed spinning me out at 70 mph. Thank you, Lord.

And then there are countless secret deliverances, whether from the lurking virus, mugger in the shadows, or shaky crosswalk. I know the Lord’s engineered such rescues repeatedly. He’s had stuff for me to do, so he kept me at it. And, no, I’m not saying that I’m still around because I’m a good guy. He let Hitler live 56 years, Dietrich Bonhoeffer only 39. His wisdom is often inscrutable, but here I am with another day. And so I must make the most and best of it as I’m able. And I hope my tattooed acquaintance will gain the same glad sense of Christian stewardship I enjoy (but very imperfectly honor).