A close call.

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broken_wheel
My son took this photo while waiting for the tow truck. Look at the wheel.

Earlier today, my son called me. He told me that while crawling along in slow moving traffic, his car suddenly wouldn’t steer properly. He heard some metallic sounds like something breaking, and suddenly his steering wheel stopped working at all! Fortunately, he reacted quickly, and slammed the car into Park and put the hazards on.

He got out of the car to look under the hood, but he saw someone in another car pointing to his front driver’s side wheel. It was bent sideways. He called a towing service and at the shop they told him his wheel was about to fall off!

He’d been on his way to work, and because he was unable to come in, lost a day’s pay as well as having to shell out some bills for the repairs (AAA is covering the tow). Working as a shift manager in a convenience store, he’s not exactly wealthy.

He could have been really angered by the inconvenience and expense. He could have groused about the lost pay and the fact he has to pass on meeting up with some of his friends tonight. It’s certainly understandable he would be at least a little irritated by all that! I know I would be.

But he was looking at this a different way. He said he felt blessed. I asked him what he meant, and he said, “It could have been so much worse! I could have been driving at 65mph on the Interstate!” My son is an atheist, but he said he felt like some sort of presence, if not actually God, must have been protecting him and made sure he was driving at only 6mph when his wheel began to go.

Thinking about what could have happened to my son was sobering, but how right he is! Something that seems like a huge pain in the butt can actually be God’s way of keeping us safe from something much worse. You just never know.

Sometimes I think my son is wise beyond his years.

13 thoughts on “A close call.”

  4. I had a wheel come off once. It was back in the early Eighties and I owned a 1973 Peugeot 504, white with a red interior, a sunroof, and a four-speed manual transmission.

    It was, thank God, a quiet street in a residential area. I had just executed a u-turn. My car felt as though it sorta floated to the ground and landed with a gentle thud. I didn’t even realize I’d lost the wheel until I got out of the car.

    It came off because the idiot who’d last put it on DIDN’T. The lug nuts had been shoved on crooked and forced onto the threads with that pneumatic gun they use, stripping them.

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    • Some “mechanics” I think are never even trained. Or they don’t fix things properly so you’re forced to go back and spend more money. I don’t trust them as a general rule.

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  6. Had a similar experience many moons ago when driving a bunch of Girl Scouts back from a camping trip. When it happened to me I was doing about 70 mph following the troop leader’s car in the carpool lane of the freeway on a Sunday afternoon. I’d been hearing noises from the wheel well but didn’t see anything when I’d stopped to check. Turned out, we think, that lug nuts had been overtorqued after previous tire rotation so had been breaking off as I drove down the mountain. Only heard noise at lower speed as gravity experienced at higher speed during rotation kept them from banging around.

    Had been hoping to just make it home when it happened. The front right side of my Expedition fell to the asphalt and the tire flipped over the median to the other side of the road. I lost track of it after that but did hear two girls crying and two girls laughing, all hysterically, from the back seats. Immediately called AAA and police, I think, while leader stepped back to make sure we were all OK. I told her to go on and we were rescued shortly thereafter by several heroes.

    I don’t recall exactly what happened after that, though I did find out later that the bouncing tire had just clipped the side view mirror of a rented moving truck going the opposite direction. That was the only damage that was really done, other than to the body of my own vehicle. The upshot was, I just figured that all of us traveling on that road that day were just meant to keep on keepin’ on and that it was not yet time for any of us to leave this earth. I knew for sure that those young girls in my backseats still had great things to contribute to the world in the long lives ahead of them.

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    • Oh, my goodness! What a scary moment that must have been. Yes, you were very lucky and so were your girls. God spared you and your girls because your work here wasn’t done. But thinking about moments like that puts chills down your spine. I had something like that happen, where I almost lost my kids due to my own stupidity. That was in 1998. To this day, I still have flashbacks of that horrible few minutes, but it also proved to me that God exists:

      The Tree

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