When one is faced with an accident, it must be handled in thought. Otherwise, each part of it is mentally repeated, and it seems more real and difficult to overcome. Mary Baker Eddy was so wise in writing in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures that “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). The very idea that we can experience an accident is like believing that chance, a roll of the dice, controls God and man. That belief is not Christian, nor is it scientific.
When driving one day last year, I was waiting to turn left from a two-lane highway onto our road, and I was hit from behind by another car. My car was pushed into a row of trees that line our property. Both cars were totaled, and I woke to see my air bag in shreds and the engine smoking. At the same time, I thought, “I am alive and well. God is my Life.”
I had pain and stiffness in my neck and hip, swelling in my legs, and some injuries from broken glass, but I was able to crawl out of the car into our front pasture. Then the twenty-third Psalm, which I had learned as a child, came as a soothing message. It begins: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” (verses 1–4).
