Unscathed after a collision
Earlier this year I spent a delightful morning thinking about God as Mind. I was totally immersed in the idea that God is the only Mind, and that there is no second or “other” mind. One of the things I thought about was that an idea is safe in Mind and can’t be disturbed or destroyed.
That afternoon I took a break for a quick ride on my bike along the Bay Trail near my house. After pedaling for a mile I stopped at a familiar T-intersection and stood in the left-turn lane, straddling my bike. That’s when I saw a van barreling down the street I was waiting to cross.
The driver made a turn onto the street I was on and was obviously distracted because she was cutting the corner so sharply that she was aimed directly at me. In that moment I knew that even if she hit the brakes, it was too late—she was going to hit me head-on. I know it was all the prayer I had done that morning that kept me totally calm, even as I wondered how far I was going to be catapulted backward.
When the van hit, I was thrown to the side. Lying on the street for only a moment, in the adjoining lane, I scrambled right up. I am so grateful that I was not angry, upset, shaking, or shaken. After hugging the hysterical driver, I checked myself over—not a scratch, bump, or bruise. Even my clothing was not ripped or torn. There was nothing to suggest that I had just been hit. The only evidence that I had been in an accident was that my bike, with its bent front wheel and twisted frame, was ready for the nearest dumpster.
The driver and I exchanged phone numbers, and I asked her to drive me home. On the ride back, a number of things presented themselves to me: I felt I was going into shock; I noticed that my back hurt; I felt a twinge on my left side; my knee and elbow hurt. I silently dismissed each one of these claims as aggressive suggestions with no God behind them. With a bit of persistence, I soon felt my normal self again. I can honestly say that from then on there were no other aftereffects from what had happened. I prayed along the lines of a passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy: “Accidents are unknown to God, or immortal Mind, and we must leave the mortal basis of belief and unite with the one Mind, in order to change the notion of chance to the proper sense of God’s unerring direction and thus bring out harmony” (p. 424 ).
When I got home I realized I needed to really negate the thought that an accident had just taken place. I recalled a time years before when a garbage truck had sideswiped the sports car I was driving and our two vehicles had become locked together. No one was hurt, but I found myself in the middle of the street being yelled at by the truck driver to move my car—an impossibility since it was tangled with his truck. At that time I had asked myself, “How can I say there are no accidents when I am looking at all this evidence of one?” The inspiration came immediately: Because there are no accidents, the ensuing resolution is not an accident being fixed, but the truth being made manifest in my experience through harmonious solutions. Right at that moment, everything began to be unstuck, literally and figuratively. The other driver stopped yelling, the vehicles were separated, and a policeman showed up without being called and attended to the rest of the details.
Refocusing on the collision with the van that day, I knew the same laws of harmony were in place. I reasoned I was untouched because a van, traveling at whatever speed, could not impact my understanding of God.
The next day when the driver came by my house to make a contribution toward a new bike, she talked about the incident as a life-changing event for her. She said she had been so busy rushing around lately that she was not taking time to slow down and focus on what was really important in life.
Sometimes we have a healing that others might attribute to luck, coincidence, or even a miracle. On some level this healing was a coincidence—but not a coincidence of material events coming together at the right time. It was the coincidence of the human and divine, the Christ—God’s loving message to humanity—expressing itself here and now, being made manifest in my experience.
Susan Breuer
San Mateo, California, US
