Centimetres from Eternity

I had only been doing something ordinary on an ordinary day. I had finished my puzzles and had driven the five blocks to the red post office box. I posted my letters — entry forms for the magazine competitions I wanted to enter, the kind of small weekly task you don’t think twice about. It was a normal errand on an ordinary day. I wasn’t in a hurry to post my letters as the expiry dates of the competitions were still days away. There was enough time for them to get there to the promoters.

I was simply heading back to my car after posting the letters in the red post office box. I was standing on the road beside my car. I wasn’t inside it yet. I was just about to open the door to get inside my car when I glanced back down the road towards the red post-box where I had posted my letters. I was checking if it was safe to open the door and may have been checking to see if I had dropped letters. I had not. That was when I saw her — and also the other driver who was turning right ahead of her. He was in line with my car, waiting for the traffic to get out of his way so he could turn. I realised that she wasn’t slowing down.

I froze.

My car was parked on the roadside on my left, just up from the red post office box, but I couldn’t open the door and get inside my car in time. At the same time, there was nowhere else for me to go. I couldn’t move forward. I couldn’t move backward. I couldn’t step safely out of the way. I couldn’t jump onto the front bonnet. There was no escape route. There was no time. Was this it? Was this the end of my life, just from posting letters? Was I going to meet Him, my Maker? Was I ready?

Later, I would recognise it as the third human response to danger: not fight or flight, but freeze. At the time, there was no thinking involved. No calculation. There was simply nowhere to go. Any movement I made could have placed me directly in her path. By God’s Grace, freezing was the only choice that could have saved me. Prayer never entered my mind. She was faster than thought itself. Faster than fear. Faster than words. Faster than prayer.

Suddenly, she was there – a driver who didn’t want to wait for the car in front of her to turn.

She forced her car between my body and the car that was turning right; a gap that was never meant for a fast-moving car, let alone a car and a standing exposed human being. She was doing at least fifty kilometres an hour. At that speed, no human body has any chance of surviving if struck directly and it was me there in danger. There just was no time to pray, no time to think, no time even to decide what to do for it looked like my time had run out. And I had no protection.

Nothing physical for me.

No metal.
No airbags.
No seatbelt.
No buffer.
Nothing.

Just my body, exposed, on the road.

She passed me by mere centimetres. Centimetres that were the difference between life and death. Between my life continuing and my life ending there on that road. Between my family still having me and my family losing me instantly. Between my new-born grandchild knowing me and my grandchild never really knowing me at all. This was the closest I have ever come to dying.

Not septic shock that put me on life support and a coma with an eighteen-day hospital stay.
Not the truck accident that wrote off our car before our son Marcus was born.
Not the thyroid problem that threatened my life due to my thyroid growing deep down into my chest and squishing my organs and windpipe.

This.

This was the moment where physics, timing and human reaction could not save me.

Only God could.

And God did.

I don’t know if the driver had even seen me or even realised that I was there. What happened next was not calm, noble, or spiritual. It was simply human. When the danger passed and she had passed me by I realised that I was still alive, for I was uninjured, untouched by the passage of her car and my body flooded with adrenaline. I wasn’t reflective. I wasn’t grateful yet. I was shaking, angry, wired and in shock. Fear and fury arrived together at a frightening pace.

I got into my car, followed her safely, not belligerently, and confronted her verbally from the other side of the road after I did a U-turn to that side after she stopped further down the road. She was dropping her child off at the local childcare centre. She just was about to open the door that her child was sitting next to. My hands were shaking. My voice was very loud and very harsh. My voice showed also that I was furious at her at the same time for my voice was sounding fiercely sharp yet completely hollowed out by fear. I asked her if she saw me there, on the road next to my car, further down the road where the red post office box was and why she did what she did. She argued the point and told me to go away.

And she didn’t even care.

That indifference stayed with me. It is one thing to survive a near death experience. It is another to look at the person who caused it and see no sign that they understood how close they came to ending your life. I drove down to Mount Druitt Police Station, and I reported her to the police there. But nothing happened to her as I never found out from the police what happened after that. Nobody from the police contacted me after that. I didn’t get my day in court to testify against her.

What bugged me was the fear, the anger, and the knowledge of how close it really had been there for me, alone and exposed and on the road, not inside my car. Afterwards, I realised that I should not have survived that moment on the road near the red post office box.

But I did.

And because I did, it changed me. After that day, I became far more careful around traffic. If a car is approaching, I no longer stand in that vulnerable space. I wait behind a vehicle or wait in front of it. I make sure I am never trapped beside metal with nowhere to go.

That moment taught me how quickly ordinary life can tilt toward eternity. I had only posted some letters. That was all. It was a run of the mill thing, something I would never have expected to be dangerous to me and threaten my life. Yet in a few seconds it became the closest I have ever come to dying that I have ever known.
When I look back now, I do not see luck.

I see God’s Mercy.
I see God’s Timing.
I see that it was not my time.

I see God’s Grace — not vague or sentimental, but precise.
Grace measured in seconds.
Grace measured in milliseconds.
Grace measured in centimetres.
Grace measured in millimetres.
Grace meeting me in the middle of an ordinary day and refusing to let it become my last day.

It was something I had done many times before my licence was suspended due to Parkinson’s disease. Nothing dangerous. Nothing unusual about the day before I went to post my letters, but it ended up not to be an ordinary day at all as I came close to meeting my God. I wasn’t ready. I should have been ready to meet Him. But He didn’t bring me Home. I’m still here. I need to be ready when Jesus calls me Home. I need to get ready as I don’t know when He will call me Home. We all need to be ready to be called Home.

That is why I still remember it so clearly.
And that is why I call it what it was:
Centimetres from Eternity.
Because it was.

Psalm 68:20