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asked:
Who knew what dead things
floating to shore created sand dunes? The instructor drew a picture of
a log on the blackboard to give the children a hint.
"People from Cuba?" Sam Smith shouted out.
His comment was gruesome, inappropriate,
and not well received. I wished I had thought of it.
So we spent the days collecting seashells
and fossils and watching the dolphins. We played basketball and frisbee
dodge ball. We looked at plankton under the microscope. We caught crabs
in the marsh mud. We petted snakes and turtles and baby alligators, and
learned the difference between a coral and king snake. At night we played
charades by the campfire, ate s'mores, then fought to catch some sleep.
And each morning we complained about who coughed, who tossed and turned,
and who snored.
In short, we had a blast. Janis and Dianne
are wonderful teachers. They love their work, and their students. The
six-hour bus ride home found a lot of children wearing joyful smiles of
satisfaction.
But the smiles faded into concern and confusion
when we stopped at the accident. The smoking car was crushed, overturned
like a turtle for all to see. As I approached the car, I had the sensation
of wrongness - it just didn't seem right that this perfect trip should
be marred with something so tragic.
However, twenty feet from the flattened car
lay an elderly gentleman on the road - the driver. As he explained it,
he had become dizzy right after his dialysis treatment, and had lost control
of the car. It had flipped across the median several times, throwing him
through the window just before its last crushing flip. Other bystanders
had already dressed his lacerations. With the help of another chaperone,
Jerry Blanton, I examined him. Amazingly, the 77 year-old man wanted to
sit up. He had no serious injuries that I could identify. We covered him
with a blanket belonging to a fellow parent, Lisa Kavadellas. It was a
"HUGS" blanket, made for the crafts fair at Hillside United Methodist
Church. Covering the blanket was a pattern of hundreds of little handprints
- helping hands, if you will.
The ambulance arrived, carrying off the man
and the blanket. We boarded the bus and left. I cleaned the blood off
of me, and then I reassured our kids that the man would be okay.
As it turned out, I was right. The gentleman,
whose name was Nathaniel, would leave the hospital the next day. The trauma
nurse at the hospital laughed and told me that Nathaniel had only needed
a few band-aids.
As the dust settled on these events, I had
two realizations. One was that a better chaperone would have led the children
in a prayer after the accident - for the well-being of the man injured
in the pathway of our bus. Stunned by the miracle on the highway, I simply
forgot. But it is never too late to pray. And prayers of gratitude are
always appropriate.
And the other was this:
God had a bus load of helping hands that
day. The exuberant children were like noisy angels playing in the orchestra
of a miracle. With that kind of power on board, there was no way a man
thrown on the highway in front of a bus would come to harm.
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