March (Web-only) 2007

ARTICLE TOOLS

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So many have called to express concern, and a few wild rumors have been floating around, so I thought it would be best to send out an "official" report of my accident on Sunday, February 25. I'm OK! Honest. Here are the details.

I had spent a lovely weekend in Los Alamos, New Mexico, speaking to a unique church that combines six different denominations. Janet traveled with me so much during the book tour these past few months that she felt obligated to stay home and do her duties at the senior center where she works, so I went alone. My New Mexico hosts met me in Taos for a delightful day of bam-bam bump skiing on Thursday, then we drove together to Los Alamos. It's quite a place, created in the 1940s for the Manhattan Project, and the fabled home of the atomic bomb. The town has more Ph.D.'s per capita than any place in the world. I had a fascinating meeting with some of the physicists and other scientists from the lab during which we discussed matters of science and faith and nuclear terrorism and pacifism and other weighty issues. Friday night I spoke on my book Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?—a very appropriate topic in view of what follows. Saturday I did a seminar consisting of three one-hour lectures and a book signing, and then took off early Sunday morning for Denver, where I planned to meet Janet for a friend's wedding.

I was driving alone on a remote highway, curvy but not too hilly, at about 65 mph. A curve came up suddenly and I turned to the left, perhaps too sharply. As you may know, Ford Explorers are rather notorious for fishtailing, and this one did. I tried to correct, but as best as I can reconstruct what happened, my tire slipped off the edge of the asphalt onto the dirt. That started the Explorer ...