YOU GONNA GET HIT

The other night, (if 4am can properly be referred to as ‘night’) I was peddling down a nearby sidewalk on my recurring 10 mile bike trek. 

As I was completing my ride, and on the appropriate side of the road facing traffic, I suddenly made out a shadowy figure approaching me in the oncoming bike lane. As the phantom grew closer, I recognized the figure as a young man on a bike; a conveyance completely devoid of front or back lights. As I previously implied, my fellow biker seemed not only oblivious to the wisdom of using lights, but he was peddling the wrong way in the bike lane.

As ‘Harry’ passed me I almost spontaneously shouted,

“You gonna get hit!”

(Not especially great grammar, but I put my point across).

I have often reflected on the brevity of life, and how that some ‘leave outta here’ much sooner than others do. And I have often thought that some among us, the so-called ‘Type A’ Personalities, have so often cheated God of His right to decide the time and method of their demise, and as a result have short circuited His plans for their lives. 

I mean, since time immemorial people have lived dangerously,  seemingly done their best to ‘check out’ early, and sometimes denied the world their potential for greatness. 

Karl Wallenda’s ill-fated attempt to walk a tightrope between two buildings in Puerto Rico. The latest incarnation of the Wallenda family who walked across the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. The sky diver who jumped without a parachute and managed to land in a specially constructed net on the ground. And less auspicious, but equally deadly incidents in which five and six adolescents have died in accidents involving texting or the use of alcohol.

I classify such behavior as nothing less than ‘tempting God.’ 

Sooner or later people like this are going to get hurt, or worse yet, they’re going to…succumb to their foolishness.

The year was 1968 and Beth P., one of my classmates, was returning home from a date with her boyfriend. It had been raining that night, and the young man took a wrong turn and, as a result, the car ended up in a flooded culvert. Beth, a precious young Christian girl, whose entire life stretched out before her, succumbed to her injuries. 

A friend of mine who lost an adult child in a similar manner put it this way.

“I think it was her time. God was simply done with her here, and I think He whispered, ‘Come Home.’”

I tend to think, she’s right. I believe when God chooses to call us home in the midst of our regular comings and goings, then it can be rightly said, “It was his time” or “God was through with her.”

God forbid, however, that someone has to admonish you or me with the kind of admonition with which I challenged that young man in the bike lane. 

…“You gonna get hit!”

While she is, at the moment, secure in the loving arms of Jesus, and would never consent to come back now, I think my friend, Beth would have been glad to have inherited a few of the years which those Type A risk takers so foolishly squandered away.


  By William McDonald, PhD. From (Mc)Donald's Daily Diary. Vol. 45. Copyright pending
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