08/08/2026
WHAT HAPPENED??
Thank you all, again, for carrying my family through this. A lot of you have already heard the short version, or read some comments. But some people wanted me to post this in a shareable fashion that told the whole story.
Late on Thursday night, July 23, I took a bad line on our property riding a 2007 Honda 500 Custom — a big lifted swamp-tire four wheeler, better than 700 pounds — going maybe 30 miles an hour. The front left wheel caught a root wrong, the back end came up, and it forward-flipped. I hit the ground first, right shoulder taking the brunt of it as it basically pile drove me into the ground with that sickening bone crumping sound - but then the machine kept rotating with my right knee now out behind me it rammed the top of my femoral head through my hip to ward the front. “Anterior dislocation, acetabulum fractured” in several places, bone fragments left behind to clean up.
Thankfully my son was riding right behind me. Even more providentially, his boy — my grandson — had just turned back toward the house minutes before. Britton kept his head, got my leg stabilized, called 911, and walked the paramedics straight to me. I remember lying there with my right leg locked in a spasm that kept tightening on its own like a someone had a ratchet strap and was angry at me, and was trying to turn my hip inside out, with every breath, clicking, another click, and my shoulder felt like bags of Legos rolling around.
My heroes from Brunswick/Bolton Fire got me out fast. Regional One shock trauma and the team at Campbell Clinic took it from there — hip reduction, a rod driven through my femur for traction, 20lbs hanging off; then hip surgery Saturday to remove the loose fragments.
What still amazes me is the timeline: hurt late Thursday night, home with my wife and kids Tuesday evening. My shoulder is too torn up to let me put weight on a walker or crutches, so for now I’m getting around by wheelchair — a couple of good folks made sure I had a power chair, which has been a lifeline.
I’ve been doing therapy hard at home, and by God’s mercy I’m already back at the office for several half days and attended a funeral. I didn’t want to miss.
But Lying still that long gives a man a lot of time to think, and here’s where my mind kept landing.
❌The Porsche Beside Me 🚘
Take yourself back about 33 years, before any phone could warn you a road was shut down ahead. I was stuck in a traffic jam going nowhere, in a pack of cars that had already tried every side street and come up empty. I called ahead to say I’d be late, accepted there was nothing to be done about it, and put on a sermon by Adrian Rogers — figured I might as well learn something while I sat there.
Next to me, dead even, bumper to bumper, was a young guy in a brand new Porsche. He wasn’t drumming his fingers in mild annoyance — he had both hands on the wheel like he meant to rip it loose, yelling, veins standing out on his neck. Same jam. Same delay. Same complete lack of power to fix a thing about it. The only difference between us was what each of us chose to do with that powerlessness. I’d been him plenty of times before. That particular day, I wasn’t.
Revealed, Not Made
The line I keep coming back to: your character doesn’t get built by what happens to you, it gets shown by what you do with it. You don’t get a vote on the traffic jam. You get a vote on whether you’re the man with the sermon playing or the man trying to break his own steering wheel.
Wiser men than me have said versions of this for a long time:
• James Lane Allen said adversity doesn’t manufacture character — it uncovers it.
• Epictetus taught that it’s not events that define a man, but what he does when they arrive.
• Marcus Aurelius wrote that whatever blocks your way can become your way forward.
• Proverbs tells us a man is proven the way silver is proven — by fire.
• James tells us to be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger — which might as well have been written for a traffic jam.
But scripture goes further than “revealed.” Romans says the trouble itself does something — it produces endurance, and endurance shapes character, and character grows hope. James says the same thing: let the testing do its full work in you, so you come out whole, lacking nothing. Job is the long version of that idea — not a man who beats his circumstances and gets a trophy, just a man who stays exactly who he was the entire way through the fire.
Viktor Frankl, who survived the camps, said they can strip a man of everything but one thing: the right to choose his own attitude toward whatever he’s handed. That, he said, is the last freedom nobody can take from you. Stephen Covey later put a name to the space Frankl was describing — the gap between what happens to you and what you do next. That gap is where your freedom actually lives.
That’s really the whole sermon in one line: you are not required to react. You are invited to respond. Reacting is the flesh grabbing the wheel. Responding is where a man finds out who he really is.
Same Test, Longer Version
I’ve thought about that Porsche a lot these past couple weeks, because I’m sitting in a much longer version of that same traffic jam now.
I can’t bear weight on my right side because of the hip. On its own, that’s a walker-and-crutches problem. But my right shoulder is broken up badly enough that I can’t lean on either one — so wheelchair it is. Not exactly how I pictured the time I’ve been celebrating that our grandson lives here with his dad now and just started second grade at Donaldson. I’d rather be out playing catch with him than having him have to hand me things.
Even so, there’s plenty left that I can do, and I mean to do every bit of it. Each morning I ask the Lord for one stretch goal — something just out of easy reach, that I’d need His help to get to.
When I left the hospital, the original plan had me in inpatient rehab anywhere from one to two weeks. So I used the earliest of those dates — August 4 — and made it my personal deadline. My stretch goal was simple: get back to the office, even half a day, before the date rehab had penciled in for ever even sending me home.
Think about that for a second. If everything had gone according to that first plan, August 4 would have been my first day back under my own roof since the wreck — the day I was supposed to be getting used to being home again.
Instead, on Monday, August 3, I sat in my office for five and a half hours. Worked on a history project I care deeply about, kept moving on my clients’ cases, made sure nobody’s matter slowed down a step because I was out. That felt like something.
There’s plenty of hard road still ahead. But the God who’s carried me this far isn’t setting me down now. I can still work. I can still counsel folks through their own hard seasons. I can still show up.  One of the best parts about my job doing serious injury work is handing out checks for $25,000 or $100,000 or more and watching my clients’ life improve as a result.
What the Wreck Showed Me About Everyone Else
Here’s the part I didn’t see coming — this wreck didn’t just test my character, it put everyone around me to the test too, and they passed in a way that floored me.
My wife. My kids. My staff, who’ve been family to me for years now. My cousins. Our community. Our mahjong friends. Our historical society. Our church. Old friends and near-strangers alike. All of it landed in the middle of getting my grandson enrolled in school here too, on top of everything, and not one person I love slowed down. They rearranged their whole lives for me without hesitation .
Letting people help me has been genuinely hard — that’s my pride talking, and it’s one of several things I’m actively working on.
Old friends I hadn’t spoken to reached out of nowhere, and we picked right back up like no time had passed. Nobody gets through this life alone, no matter how independent he thinks he is.
Everybody’s Fighting Something
All of this has changed how I look at strangers now — the ones whose fight I’ll never actually see.
There’s an old line from a Scottish preacher writing under a pen name back in 1897: 🏴be kind, because every person you meet is carrying something heavy.😓
Picture if everybody walked around with an honest little sign on their forehead, telling you exactly what they were hauling that day. The cashier who seems checked out and slow — maybe she just left her first round of chemo after the cancer came back, and she’s running on fumes. The friend who keeps turning down invitations — not pride, but a health issue she’s too embarrassed to explain, and she can’t risk being far from a bathroom. The neighbor who never returns your tools — not carelessness, but early memory loss that’s left him surrounded by things he can no longer place.
None of us can actually read minds. And yet we act like we can — filling in every blank about somebody else’s motives, and almost always filling it in with the worst possible version.
The driver who cuts you off and doesn’t wave might just have gotten the call that his wife’s in labor. The one who merges into you and never looks over might be losing her eyesight and squeezing out her last few weeks before she turns in her license for good. Sure, it’s possible somebody cut you off just to ruin your day — but it’s the least likely story, not the first one you should reach for.
I’m not saying everybody’s operating at their best. I’m saying life gets a lot easier to live when you assume they might be trying to.
The Only Thing You Truly Own
Billy Joel once wrote a song aimed at young people wrestling with depression — he’d been there himself and wanted it to sound hopeful instead of heavy. His point, in short: your mistakes might be the one possession in this life that’s entirely, unmistakably yours.
While significant, this is far from the worst injuries that I encounter on a regular basis doing what I do for a living. There are people around us who have very children. Our parents are well very soon. There are people around us who had to turn in their keys to drive and are worried about being old alone and forgotten. There are children that have traveled thousands of miles to be at Saint Jude to find out that they may not ever go back home.
As a mind of saying in a storm, exiting a storm or getting ready to head into a storm.
The traffic jam three decades back and this wheelchair now aren’t the same circumstance, but they’re grading the same exam. You don’t choose what lands on you. You choose what you do with it. And somewhere in the early mornings and the late-night rough patches, mostly when nobody’s watching — that choice is quietly telling you exactly who you are, and who you’re becoming. I’m leaning hard on the Lord to try to extract every bit of learning and encouragement. I can from this and to share it with those like you, who will soon be in another storm.
Thank you, truly.
