I am terrified of motorcycles. And when I say terrified, I mean TERR-I-FIED. I would pretty much do anything if it meant that I wouldn’t have to get on the back of one of those things.
Now, I know people have fears of things that they really do not have an explanation for, and that’s fine. My fear of motorcycles, though, has a perfectly good explanation, and usually renders a response of ‘oh, yeah I can understand that’ whenever I am forced into telling people the story of why I am afraid of them. My experiences are not something that controls my life, in fact until recently, I wouldn’t even say that it has had a noticeable effect on my life. I realized that that was not the case on the night that we arrived in Vietnam.
Our squad had been split up due to visa issues, and so we were traveling into the country on two different days. I was with the second group, which arrived on Friday. Now, in all fairness, I did know that there were going to be a large number of motorbikes in Vietnam, but nothing could have prepared me for the scene that I was about to see. The entire half an hour taxi ride from the airport to our hotel was my perfect definition of hell. There are at least 20 times more motorbikes in HCM than any other form of transportation, and I was completely unprepared for my reaction. While everyone else in the car was oohing and aahing at the mass amount of motorbikes that were zipping past us, I experienced my first ever panic attack. I tried not to be a burden to them, because after all, this was my issue not theirs, but it is hard to make messy crying and shaking go unnoticed, and eventually the ugly truth of where my deep rooted fear of these monsters came from was public knowledge. I remember getting to our hotel in a terrible mood, with a migraine that had developed from the experience of the last half hour. I immediately decided that if this is what Vietnam was like, it was going to be a terrible month. Immediately I placed a negative view on the country, and I shut down in order to protect myself from feeling the pain reliving that day.
Flash back to 5 ½ years ago. I had just finished my first semester at Lycoming, just finished pledging into a sorority, I was on a total life high. It was memorial day weekend, and my family was on one of our annual camping trips. We had gone home for a day for one of my brother’s baseball games, and I had gone with a family whose children I had been babysitting for a joint birthday party. It was a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, the kind where there is not a cloud in the sky, the kind that makes you want to roll the windows down, turn the music up as loud as it can go and just drive. We were driving home from the birthday party, and I was sitting the in passenger seat singing along with the children’s cd that was playing I the car, when all of a sudden the motorcycle that had been traveling in front of us veered over into the lane of oncoming traffic and hit a box truck head on. The next few minutes seemed, and sometimes still seem like an eternity. The keg that they had been carrying in the sidecar of the motorcycle ended up hitting just feet in front of me on the hood of the car, and although I don’t think I realized it at the time, I am thankful everyday that our car had not stopped a few feet further, or I may not be here. I remember watching the whole event unfold like a movie. One second everything was fine and we were just driving along the road on our way home and the next I’m watching in slow motion as a motorcycle and two people are literally flying through the air in front of me. The net few minutes went by extremely fast. We slammed on the breaks, the keg hit, the motorcycle crashed to the ground in front of the car, and I immediately grabbed my phone and dialed 911. I remember throwing the door of the car open and jumping our while on the phone with the woman at the call center. The woman who was driving the car that I was in had run up the road to where the person on the motorbike had been thrown, and I guess I was on my way there when I was stopped dead in my tracks. I’ll spare the details for your sake, but in that moment, I processed that there had been two men on the motorcycle, not just one, and the driver lay on the road just yards away from me, with no hope of being alive. I remember screaming at the woman who was on the phone with me, angry at her that she wasn’t understanding what I had been trying to tell her. Looking back I realize that she was probably just trying to calm me down, and that I was probably not the most friendly person that she talked to that day, but there is grace for people who are in situations like that. After all, it is probably the single most traumatizing experience that I will ever have in my life. Seeing someone die is not something that people soon forget, but seeing someone die in a traumatic way, that is something that stays with you your entire life. I think what strikes me most looking back on that day is that it was such a contradictions, the beautiful blue sky and perfect weather all around us, and death horrifically strewn on the road in front of me. Despite having moved on from the events of that day, that scene is not something that will ever leave my memory. Despite the fact that I did not know the men before the accident, I attended the funeral as some sort of a closure if you will. By the grace of God, it actually worked, and over the years since the accident, the only residual effects that I have noticed are that I tend to stay towards the outside of the road around where the accident happened, and I despise motorcycles, as I now have a newly formed view of them as death traps.
Flash forward to Vietnam. Within a few days, the effects of being constantly surrounded by motorbikes had faded slightly, and I was getting used to the fact that I pretty much just couldn’t get away from them no matter how hard I tried. On a few occasions, I had been asked, but really more like told, that I was going to have to ride a motorbike to get to or from ministry. I was quick to turn down the offer of rides, and I can never thank my team enough for fighting for those taxis over motorbikes for my sanity’s sake. After several days of not so gracefully dancing around not riding a motorbike, something inside me hit a cord. We were leaving our ministry that Friday night, and for whatever reason, I announced that I was going to ride a motorbike all the way home from ministry, which was about a 20 minute ride. To this day I don’t know what made me do it, but naturally I’m going to give all that glory to Jesus because I’m positive I didn’t do it by my own choosing. I spent the entire 20 minutes white knuckling the handle bars behind me, but arrived safely and not nearly as shaken up as I thought I would be, thanks to my friend who had driven me carrying on a conversation the whole way home. That night was like a mini celebration every time it came out to someone that I had gotten on a bike, because we had three teams living together in Vietnam and by this point, almost all of them knew my story. There are only a handful of times in my life that I have felt so accomplished as I did that night. Over the next few weeks, I rode bikes several times to and from ministry, and although I would be the last person to say that it is my new favorite hobby, I gained almost a sense of peace when I was on them. It’s something I will never be able to explain.
It’s funny actually, how quickly God healed me from that incident, or at least how quickly I thought he healed me. The days that followed the accident were anything but easy, and I remember processing over and over again what had happened until I finally came to a place where I realized that I had no control over the situation, and that if I was going to be honest with my self, I had to admit that there was nothing that I could have done to prevent the accident from happening, I didn’t cause the accident in any way, and there was nothing that I could have done to save the lives of either of those men that day. When everything came crashing back down on me that first night in Vietnam, I was certain that it was going to be a horrible month, but for whatever reason, God had different plans, and my mind was changed within the week.
As I sit in a little Cambodian café writing this, I can’t help but thank God for taking that burden away from me not once, but twice. Most people won’t ever experience something like that in their lifetime, and for that I am thankful. I would never want anyone to see the things that I saw on that day. Even more than that though, I am thankful that God is the ultimate healer and that because of him, that day is not something that I have to struggle with my whole life. Thank you Jesus.
————————————————————————————————————————–
I am still in need of approximately $5,000 in order to complete the race.
If you feel called to donate, please do so by clicking the ‘support me’ link to the left of this page
Thank you!
