Saving Grace

It was a busy Friday. 

We had two plumbers here making improvements, going from the exterior of our home, to the basement, to the kitchen, to the bathroom, multiple times. 

Cody was working diligently to prepare the farm for his upcoming travels. 

I was in the house – trying to stay out of the plumbers’ way – making lunch, when I heard a strange, loud noise. 

“Call 911!” I heard my husband frantically yell from the yard. I grabbed my phone and looked out our kitchen window: a red SUV was in a million pieces in the ditch in front of our house. I heard the two plumbers run up our basement steps and dart outside. 

I tried to figure out what was going on while on the phone with dispatch: 

Serious car accident on 35. No one is getting out of the car. Car flipped several times. Windshield busted out. Both ends of the car are crushed like a pop can. Was another vehicle somewhere I couldn’t see? There is no way this is a single vehicle accident. A woman is crawling out! She is screaming for her baby. Oh no, there is a baby in the car. We need help.

The plumbers ran across 35 and jumped onto the vehicle and somehow got the car seat out. The dispatcher told them to keep the baby in the car seat, but get it somewhere warm. Cody suggested our milkhouse, but my motherly instincts told me to get the baby in our warm home. This would prove to be a mistake. 

It took a while for the mother to realize her baby was in someone else’s care and in our house. This was the first red flag. She came in extremely distraught as anyone who had just rolled their vehicle three full times (this according to investigators) across a state highway would be. She was barefoot, bloody and disoriented. Her concern then shifted from her baby, who would be fine, to the ramifications of what she’d just done. She suddenly had a break down in the middle of my kitchen. Reality had set in. 

While I stayed in the house with our two little ones, the paramedics, officers and others rotated in and out of our kitchen gathering details of how this could have happened. I tried to keep our children quiet while watching the clean-up from a window. There was debris and glass all the way across the highway, ditch to ditch. 

The woman was traveling from a clinic in Richmond back to her home in Muncie. I don’t know, or care to, the details of how an accident that horrific happened or the choices she made that lead to it. What I cared about what that the baby was ok. She was. Her blanket was covered in blood; the baby didn’t have a scratch on her little body. She was giggling by the time they left my kitchen. 

“I have no idea how this baby is fine. She doesn’t have a scratch,” I texted Cody. He was outside working with officers and moving equipment so EMTs could get in our driveway. 

But Cody knew. While they were picking up the debris, something caught his eye. Among the bottles of cheap perfume, fast food trash, clothes, toys, sub woofers and more, a leather-bound Bible lay in the middle of US Highway 35. That baby was in much better hands that afternoon than we realized. 

There is a grand plan for the child; her story is just beginning. From the moment I took the bloody blanket off her and saw her big, healthy smile, I just wanted to hold her tight. 

But I soon realized that little girl 

was being held tightly and lovingly already, 

by Someone far stronger than I.