Dan Barker on accordion and evangelist Frank Gonzales on trumpet.A strong vibration and rumbling noise woke me up.
When I opened my eyes, I was shocked to see that the car I was driving was drifting onto the left shoulder of the road. Panicked, I quickly steered back into the right lane.
I was now wide awake. My heart was pounding. My eyes were frozen open. My hands gripped the steering wheel like a vice.
In the station wagon with me were six or seven young people, dozing or oblivious to what had just happened.
It was the summer of 1968. I had just turned 19, and I was one of the team leaders taking high-school aspiring missionaries to spread the love of Jesus across Mexico with the Frank Gonzales Evangelistic Association.
An hour earlier, we had left Tampico, on the Gulf of Mexico, where we sang and preached in a couple of churches. I was driving the team west on a two-lane rural highway on a muggy afternoon, headed for another city in need of the Gospel. We were all tired after weeks of crisscrossing the country. Our blue Chevy did not have air conditioning. The swishing of humid air through the open windows, the lazy buzzing of insects and the whirring of tires had lulled me to sleep.
I was horrified. What if there had been an approaching vehicle in the other lane? Or a parked car on the shoulder? Or a tree or utility pole or ditch? I might never have known what happened.
I could not sleep for a day or two after that. I felt like I was injected with a month’s supply of caffeine.
I never told anyone about it.
Over the years, I have often thought about those few seconds. Who might have died? If there had been any injured survivors, what might their futures have been like? How many life trajectories would have been scarred or shattered? What families or children or grandchildren would not exist today?
I think about my own children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and my life’s work over the six decades since that brief instant. My music would be uncomposed and unperformed, my books unwritten. My wife Annie Laurie and my friends would have never known about me.
Pushing myself to the point of exhaustion was irresponsible. If I had survived, I would have had to live with the shame that the tragedy was my fault. That — and a lax ministry that sometimes put providence over prudence.
The parents of those students had all prayed, I am sure, for God’s protection before sending their son or daughter off on a wild summer-long missionary journey. They had trusted me with their care. They didn’t know that their child would be hurtling down a foreign highway in a vehicle driven by a sleeping teenager. If any of them had later heard about our brush with death, I’m sure they would have said, “Praise God for watching over my child!”
But it wasn’t God who jarred me back into consciousness. It was the shoulder of the road. Did God keep a truck from approaching? Did he say, “I see Dan is falling asleep, but I’ll make sure it happens where there are no obstacles”? Why didn’t he keep me awake in the first place? Or warn me to pull over and rest?
I later worked briefly with Youth With a Mission (YWAM), a worldwide Christian missionary organization. Some of my friends were with the mission for many years. In 2024, 11 missionaries from the outfit, including the team leader, were killed and another eight injured in Tanzania when a construction truck lost its brakes and smashed into one of their mini-school buses. The tragic accident involved four motor vehicles with a total of 25 deaths and 21 injured. I have no doubt that the mission trip had been “protected” by hundreds of prayers, not just by family members but by the many faithful members of that global ministry.
It should be obvious that prayer is irrelevant. What happened was pure luck — bad for them, good for me. Did God keep me alive so I could become an atheist emissary? Did he not want the missionaries who died in Tanzania to continue proselytizing? Does he remember that he said to his followers, “All things whatsoever you shall ask in prayer believing you shall receive”? Or does he just roll the dice to learn whose prayers he will ignore?
I no longer believe in God, of course. But if he does exist, he’s asleep at the wheel.
Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
5 Responses
Dan,
In college I saw myself as an avowed atheist. I loved to debate the issue with believers and discuss it with all others. I coined the phrase ”Man created God in his own image” as a cynical playoff of the biblical phrase that God created man in his own image. It was my rejection of the humanoid God spoken of in the Bible. It was my cynical condescension toward traditional society, and the religion I and others around me had been taught.
You do not have to accept any of those concepts of God. You do not have to accept anyone else’s idea of God. Any God which does not touch you personally and directly, and does not affect you deeply, is not your God! You are correct to not believe in such a God.
I am a creature of logic. If I am to believe something, it must not be contrary to my life experience. I now believe in God, but have not changed my requirement that God not contradict science, history and life’s experience. The difference, I have learned through hindsight, is that my problem was that I had accepted the definition of God taught to me by others, and therefore was forced to either reject such a God or suspend experience.
Wouldn’t it be nice to believe in a God that is believable? In order to believe in God, which can also be called spiritual enlightenment, there is no need to suspend reason and experience. Just because a belief in God does not contradict reason and experience, that does not mean that it must be fully explained by reason and experience. Just because you have not yet experienced something, does not mean it does not exist.
We each have our own path to walk and no one can do it for us. The nature of spiritual enlightenment, or God, is that you must find it yourself. If you do not find God yourself, you have not found it. A teacher or guide can help you along the way, but it is you who must ultimately connect directly with your pure inner spirit.
I have discovered God myself, and I have been surprised to learn that the God I have discovered is the same transcendental Universal Love that is at the heart of the beliefs of enlightened Jews, Christians, Islamists, Hindus, Buddhists, humanists, atheists, and enlightened people of every age and place. Some call it God, and some do not, but it is the same. I have also discovered that the path to God is within me.
The operative word is love. At the heart of the beliefs of the enlightened of all of the Earth’s great religions and non-religious spiritual and philosophical beliefs is the same thing. It is just expressed in different words and seen through the prism of different cultures and times.
One day when I was in my late twenties, a friend of mine and I passed a group of people on the sidewalk and started talking with them. Somehow, we began talking about spirituality. One person in the group seemed wise to me. I remember he called me an old soul. He invited us to come sometime and visit him and his family at his apartment.
We took him up on it a few days later. A group of people had gathered around him, and informal sessions were held in his living room pretty much every night. I joined them.
During those sessions there were discussions about spirituality, about life, about meaning, about the very nature of understanding. The discussions were very deep. I had never before been in such an environment. I had many questions. I learned so much. After each session, I sat by myself pondering what I had learned. An unexpected revelatory feeling eventually came over me. The feeling of being at one with all living things, with the entire universe. Pure infinite awareness. I experienced God.
I was entirely in that awareness experience for about three weeks. I developed a philosophy of life during that time, which has kept evolving over the years. It is the philosophy contained in my book Awaken Your Soul: How to Find Your Inner Spirit and Life’s Purpose.
Theodore Orenstein
Thank you, Theodore. In the end, love is what matters, no matter what we call it.
Hi Dan. Thanks for the story. When I was 15, in 1968, I was studying Spanish in Mexico City. I’m sure you know of the massacre that happened in October of that year. I was there. My best friend, Beto, was standing just to my left, and he was killed that day. If the cop/military/whoever had aimed about a foot to his left, I would have been the dead one, not Beto. To this day, I can’t unsee Beto’s blood on my tennis shoes and skirt. I didn’t think, then, that any god had saved me. I also had never heard the word “atheist”. (I didn’t learn that word til almost 20 years later, and then had to look it up in the dictionary. I remember thinking, “Huh. So that’s what I am.”) But I knew who was responsible for killing Beto, and I guess it was just luck that I wasn’t one of those young people who were murdered. (BTW, the government of Mexico lied about the massacre for years, and we still don’t know how many people died. Last time I looked at the official list of deaths from that day, it wasn’t called a massacre, and Beto’s name wasn’t on it.) You can title this story “Nice catholic girl loses faith.”
Wow, what a story! Yes, I was in Mexico City that year, and I remember the story, but we were so disconnected from the news and from politics, so concerned about saving souls for the next life, that we paid little attention to what was going on in the real world around us. I am glad you survived, but so sad about your friend.
I also was in Mexico City in 1968. I was sitting in my car in front of Sanborns across from the Angel when I felt a strong rumble like the ground was shaking. I turned to my left to see Paseo de la Reforma. What I saw was a long line of tanks rumbling down Reforma on the way to the university. It was unbelievable to me that such a thing could be happening in a city. I’ll never forget it.