Jeff
http://www.godsurfer.com/

People of faith choose to view the world differently. Your luck = my miracle.

Either way my friend, I'm glad I made it. If you are right and I am wrong, I still believe in the goodness of God.

Blessings to you bro,

Shaun

A few elements to take note of are (1) Cuts to the face produce much more blood flow than cuts on other areas of the body and with 300 stitches needed, there would have likely been copious amount of blood all over Shaun's face, that along with the glass shards embedded in the wounds, and also along with Shaun’s less than fully stoic constant screaming (using allegedly broken facial bones) likely would have contributed to a visceral atmosphere of gore that could have understandably shaken even seasoned EMTs and emergency room doctors and nurses into an exaggerated state of emotional anxiety and trepidation leading them to initially speculate that there was damage to the bone structure of Shaun's face that was underlying, and concealed by, the gory mess on top.

(2) Once the blood was washed off and the glass shards removed, Shaun’s face didn’t look all that terrible. We can see this cleaned up face in the pictures that he posted. In these photos, his nose is straight, and the cuts and abrasions appear to be more from scraping against glass – face grating against the shattered windshield as his face pushed through and grating across the broken edges again as he fell back into the car.

(3) From my own set of personal experiences, it seems that car windshields are not engineered to break people’s faces, but are instead engineered with the purpose of bending, flexing, and giving in when confronted with human projectiles. I once saw a nine year old girl’s head make a head-sized bubble/dent in a windshield to the point of nearly breaking it through. She received a head scan and no bones were broken. Also, a high school colleague of mine was thrown fully through his front windshield and over the hood of his car when hitting a tree at high speed. He also had no broken bones in his body and when he returned to school his face looked much like Shaun’s in the picture. There were no theories of God surrounding that incident. Mainly just increased focus on the importance of wearing a seatbelt, not driving too fast, as well as a (secular-style) humbled appreciation of human life and of second chances that come to us by virtue of luck outside of our own control (enhanced by safety/impact engineering in the automotive industry). Also, I was a passenger in a car once, along with other members of my family, that slid off of the interstate at 65 miles an hour and headed sideways down a steep hill and very nearly flipped. I didn’t feel compelled to attribute survival and lack of injury to deities, but more so to luck, to safety engineering of modern automobiles, to safety engineering of roads (that had the hill been slightly steeper there would have been an increased chance of a guard rail having been present), as well as the balanced helpful role that the rain that caused the car to slide off the road in the first place played in lubricating the ground so that we slid through slippery mud, rather than traveling sideways over dry ground that would have much more likely caught a tire and caused the car to flip).

Anyway, those are just some thoughts and observations from a more secular perspective to contribute to bringing balance to some of the deistic perspectives represented here. We can choose to say, Glory be to God, Shaun is saved! Or we can choose to say that Shaun got unlucky by not paying attention while driving on ice without a seatbelt, but that his unluck was not so bad as to kill him and now we can all benefit by learning some life lessons from his sharing of his experience.

Thanks Shaun and glad that you’re OK now!

In Christ's love
-Tyler Irby