He's Dead. I Think.

“Son, are you okay?” I opened my eyes and looked up at the face of a man I was pretty sure I should recognize. The summer sun haloed his head as he leaned over me, and offered his hand. “Let me help you up.”

That's when I realized I was not “up”. I was lying on my back in the middle of the road, in a patch of loose gravel. As he pulled me to my feet, I noticed my wrecked bicycle to my left, bent at the crossbeams and the front fork.

He put my bike in the back of his pickup truck, guided me to the front seat, and drove this disoriented 16-year-old around the corner and up the hill to my house. My mom met us outside, and I was delivered into her care. My brother stared at me open-mouthed as I walked by.

My sister got strangely angry when I asked her “again” what day it was, and I couldn't understand why everyone wanted to know how bad my face was hurting. Dad was called home, and off I was carted to the doctor, then the ER.

I had a concussion, and asphalt in the left side of my face, from my eyelid down to my jaw line. All evidence pointed to me taking a nasty spill from my bicycle when I hit the gravel, and greeting the road face first.

I was blessed. A quarter-inch higher, the doctor said, and I probably would be blind in my left eye. I still don't know who the kind neighbor was (my parents probably recall), or if I would have serious scars if he had not found me and helped when he did.

But he did help. Some would say that it is only common courtesy and common sense to help a bloodied teenager lying in the middle of the road. Not so. So many people today would drive on by, afraid to get involved, or just indifferent to someone else's plight.

Others would be eager to speculate on what really caused that teen to get hurt in the first place. It was probably a drug deal gone bad, or he was into something he shouldn't have been.

I noticed a school friend passing as I rode in our car's backseat, face bandaged – her mouth dropped open and she pointed at me. When I returned to school in August, I found out I had lost limbs and been dead for about six weeks. I thanked my friends for attending my funeral.

If this had happened in 2014, instead of 1986, the information would have been posted to Facebook the same day I was injured, and no one would have thought I was dead.

Maybe.

I was involved in a motor vehicle accident in 2003, on Interstate 59, roughly 30 miles south of where we lived at the time. About the same time I got in touch with my wife at the school where she taught, she was already hearing rumors that I had been in an accident, and had been killed.

Sometimes faster communication just means faster inaccuracies and quicker gossip.

“I'm afraid that when I come I might find you as I wish you were not … that there perhaps is quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder” [2 Corinthians 12:20].

“Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” [Ephesians 4:29].

“If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue …, this person's religion is worthless” [James 1:26].