STORY=POWER 2a - BMW Driver, Dog Attack

Early one morning, I was driving my kids to school. Actually, the whole family was in the car, the 3 kids in the back, just a small, um, family car, and my wife and I in the front. And as we were driving along, we had just moved from Tasmania, which which is an island below the mainland of Australia, to Melbourne, which was the mainland. And we were still living with my wife's in-laws until our house was ready for us to move into. So it was roads we weren't familiar with, and we're driving the kids to school, and just as I'm driving along, talking to my wife, the phone rings. And so I reach over with one hand, and I have the hands-free thing, so it's good. You know, all I have to do is press answer. So I reach over, I look down, press answer, and in the time that I reach down to press answer and look back up, My wife is screaming, and I look over at her, "What are you screaming about?" And she points in front of me, and there's this car coming backwards at me at really fast speed. BMW just coming right at me. And you know, you take everything in, and it's like it goes into slow motion, and I'm like, "Why is that guy just stopped in the middle of the road? Or is he coming back? No, he's just stopped. Why is he stopped?" And then I look up, and I see there's a red light above him. And I'm coming at him quite quickly, and so I slam the brakes on, and I turn, and Remember I pressed answer on the phone? Well, it was my dad that had called. So my dad hears all of this happening. My wife screams and my car screeches and I say, "Oh no, what's going on?" And then swerve and the front end of our car clips the back end of the BMW. We're in a little Daihatsu Charade and it crumpled the entire front of the car. Just absolutely pulled the hood or the bonnet right up to the windshield and just folded it up, and the back of the BMW, just the bumper went, "Tsk, tsk, tsk," like that. That's all. And so the car could just drive. I limped my car off the road, the man in the BMW pulled off the side of the road, and I thought, "Oh boy, here it goes. I've just run into somebody sitting at a stoplight. He's done nothing wrong. He is going to let me have it." And as he comes towards me, he gets out of his car in front of me, and he walks out of his front door and comes around the side of his car and comes towards not my side, but my wife's side of the car, And he taps on the window and she's hyperventilating and tears are coming down, the kids are all crying in the back seat. And he knocks on her window, or taps on her window, and she rolls it down and he says in a just peacefully calm voice, "Are you alright, ma'am?" And she says, "Yeah, I think so. I feel okay." And he says, "No, nothing? You don't feel sore anywhere? Whiplash or anything?" She's like, "No, no, I think I'm okay." He looks at the kids in the back and he says, "What about you kids? How are you?" You know, wiping the tears. "Yeah, we're okay." And he said, "Okay." And then he looks over at me, "You, sir?" I said, "Yeah, I'm fine." And he said, "Well, we better swap details so we can get this settled." And I was just amazed. I was blown away. I was thinking, "What just happened here? Why is this guy not yelling at me?" And I just, you know, I'm thinking to myself how I would respond if somebody had ran into the back of me. And this guy is just so different than what I expected. I get out of the car, we swap details, get back in the car, and a friend comes because we can't drive the car. So we call a friend and he comes and he takes the kids to school. We call a tow truck, pull the car and put it in our front yard until we can take it to the wreckers. As I'm processing it, I'm thinking, "You know what? That man never told me— he told me his name, he wrote it and gave it to me, and his details, but he never told me what he believed. He never told me that he was a Christian or he wasn't a Christian. He just acted in a way that told me something about the core of him, something about where his foundation was that for me, he gave me a snapshot of Jesus, of how Jesus would respond if you had run into the back of his car. That story became such a challenge in my life because I started thinking, "Well, how do I respond when something happens that I can't expect, you can't get ready for it. And something bad happens and you're run into, something happens where you just go, and oh, this is not right. And you start to have that mental construction happen where you're gonna let the other person have it. And then I think, no, I wanna be a different kind of person. I wanna be like Jesus. I wanna give them a snapshot of what Jesus is like. And so I started using this illustration, this story of hitting the BMW driver in a sermon. I do a fair bit of traveling and preach at different churches in Australia, so when I would go to a church for the first time, that would often be the first sermon. I traveled and preached this at a number of places over the passing of a year or so, and had moved on to another sermon by the time that I was at Adelaide camp meeting. This young man comes up to me— well, he was younger than me, but he was about 6'4" and really well-muscled and used to be a rugby player. Almost made it to the professional level before he became a Christian and decided that he would like to work full-time selling books door-to-door. And so this boy, or man, came up to me. His name was Matt. And Matt said, "Hi Dave, my name's Matt." And I was sitting, I used to work at a publishing house, so I was sitting representing the publishing house and talking about the books and the magazines we produced. And he said, "Can I tell you a story?" And I said, "Oh, I love stories, please do." And he said, "Do you remember you came to our church in Adelaide about a year ago and you told the story of hitting the BMW. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's quite a story. And he said, yeah, he said, well, I listened and I heard the story, and I can't remember what the rest of the sermon was about, but when you told that story of the BMW driver, I can remember thinking, I could never be like that. If somebody ran into me, I— he said, I was just like you, I related perfectly to you. And I said, yeah, I would have got out of the car and used all of my verbal strength to let the other person know how I felt. And he said, and at least that's what I thought I would do. And he said, and as I started going door to door and selling books. He said, I was always afraid of one thing. He said, I've got a fear of big dogs, and it's the fear of a lot of door-to-door salesmen that somebody's gonna have a dog that's not on a leash or not tied up or somehow is gonna get a hold of them and they're gonna have to protect themselves. And he said, so, you know, I played in my mind, what would I do, what would I do if something happened? And he said, and finally one day it happened. I came to this door and I knocked on the door And the young man inside the house, he opened the door just a crack, and I could see that he was maybe 18, 17 years old. And I said— I opened my spiel of, you know, I've got some material I'd like to show you, and would you be interested in— and he just opened the door a little bit further, and somehow in just opening the door, this dog pushed him through the door and was on me. And he said it was not just a little dog or even a medium-sized dog. It was a bullmastiff. And when it lifted itself up up and came at me, its head was where my head was, and it just lunged at me. And he said, I threw my arm up and blocked, and the dog's teeth bit into my arm and just tore. And when he showed me, as he was telling the story, he had these huge gouges. They were scars now, but massive trails down his arm. And he said, and so I lifted like that, and the dog went up and claws went like that down my leg. And he said, I have scars to match these ones on my leg where it went right through my slacks, right through my pants. Just tore my leg up. And he said, blood was just pouring out of my arm and out of my leg. And the dog jumped back down and we— he said, I was just absolutely terrified and my mind was racing and it did that same slow motion thing your mind did where you're like, oh, I'm gonna— this is gonna, you know, and he just was going through all this stuff. And he said, and then I looked at this young man's eyes and he said, I don't know how it happened, but in my panic I just looked and he was standing there trying to get a hold— he just got a hold of the back of the collar of the dog, trying to pull the dog back. And he's looking up at me, and I saw in his eyes not just fear but terror. This kid was absolutely beside himself with terror, and he didn't know what to do. And he said, and the minute I saw the terror in his eyes, he said, Dave, I don't know why this happened, but I just snap thought, I want to be the BMW driver. He said, I don't know why that happened, but instantly I thought, I want to be the BMW driver. And he said, and I started saying, well, and I grabbed the dog and helped him with the dog, even though I used to be afraid of the things. And I pushed the dog back in, we put him in the backyard. We band myself up, we called the emergency services, and as they were coming, I sat on the couch with this young man and said, "It's gonna be okay, it's gonna be okay." And I started caring for his needs while I'm the one bleeding. And he said— and this young man said, "I don't know what to do. We shouldn't have that dog here. It's not even our dog. It's my dad's brother's dog, but my dad's brother just died last month of cancer, and my dad— it's the only living thing my dad has left of his brother, and so he knows he shouldn't have it here in this small place, but he just keeps it here." And and now they're gonna have to put the dog down. And Matt said, "No, they're not gonna have to put the dog down because I don't have to tell people and stuff." He said, "Why don't we just, you know, not worry about it? Let's worry about you. What can I do to help you not feel so bad?" And he prayed with this young man and had a number of visits where he went back and visited this family again. He didn't tell me whether he ever sold any books to them, but he created a relationship. And what Just amazed me, and I asked him right after he finished telling the story, I said, "Matt, can I tell that story when I travel around and tell people stories about storytelling?" And he said, "Why would you want to tell that story? It's a horrible story." I said, "No, it's a brilliant story that illustrates that when we tell a story at an emotional level to someone else, that story becomes part of them, and they may forget the story, but when they need it, your mind brings back story faster than anything." and your mind, snap, decided, "I want to be the BMW driver," and that's exactly what you became.