I noticed that there was a cop car coming up behind me. The cop car had on its lights and sirens. I punched it. I had a souped-up car for the reason of just getting into mischief and that’s it.
My passenger said, “I see lights.” As I approached the scene there was a young girl there. She was on her way to work and she stopped because she saw the girl initially wreck. She was trying to render aid to her. When I lost control of my car I hit her with the driver's side and killed her instantly. Her shoes were seventy feet apart. She was twenty-five years old. She had just gotten married. She was a Christian girl and her family was well respected.
I wanted to go to them because that’s how I was raised. If you wrong somebody you apologize. I wasn’t a good person but I wasn’t a monster either. But my lawyer told me, “If you go and you apologize to them and they record you, they can manipulate what you say.”
I received countless death threats. “If we catch you out in town we are going to kill you. We’re going to hurt you.” One time I came home and there was a dead dog in my driveway.
I had my brother who went to church. He was a preacher. I was agnostic at best but drugs, alcoholism, and sexual immorality.
A month before this wreck my brother called me on the phone. He said, “Caleb I don’t normally talk to you like this but I feel the Lord has laid you on my heart and I want to let you know that if you keep going and you keep living life the way that you’re living the bridge is out ahead.”
My family had shown up just to visit with me after a tragedy like this. My brother got down on my level and looked me in the eyes and said, “Does He have your attention now?”
That night I went to the revival. I couldn’t tell you what the man preached. I went down to the altar and prayed best as I knew how and started on a journey with the Lord.
One thing led to another and the criminal case rocked on. I got another job and a girl came in and as I was helping her she said, “If you don’t care, please pray for my cousin. His wife died about a year ago. She was on her way to work one morning and she saw somebody had an accident. She stopped to help them. While she was there helping some young punk teenage kid came flying up and ran her over and killed her.”
At that moment my mind went to, the family has found out where I work and they sent somebody in here to record me or to gather evidence against me or something.
So, I tried to maintain my composure but I couldn’t. I left. After about twenty minutes I heard someone say my name. I turned around and it was my boss. She was walking toward me and she had tears streaming down her face. She came over to me and took my hands. She said, “Caleb, she had no idea who you were but she is out there in the parking lot and wants to talk to you.”
She ran up to me and wrapped her arms around me and hugged me. Me and her cried and wept for probably an hour out there. We stood out there from eight-thirty or nine in the morning until three o'clock that afternoon. She said, “We thought that you didn’t care. We thought that you were some monster. I said, “No, I couldn’t apologize to you because my lawyer threatened me with my representation. Two weeks after this meeting I got a phone call from my lawyer. He said, “They have worked up a plea bargain for you. You are not going to get a better deal than this.”
The day came when I had to go before the judge. When I began to speak about my son the Lord pricked my heart because I was looking at the mother of a girl who is gone. Behind her was a step-father who loved that little girl. I looked up at that lady who is the mother of the deceased and I told her, “Ma’am I don’t know what it feels like to lose a child. I can only imagine the pain and the heartache that you are going through. But I want you to know that if I could go back I would go back and take it back a million times. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for what happened. I’m so sorry for what I did.
When I was talking to that woman I have never had a person pay attention to me as that woman was paying attention to me at that point and time.
Her eyes were as big as they could have gotten. It was like the words that were coming out of me were like breath to her. It just seemed like she desperately needed to hear what I was saying.
When I got done speaking I put my head down. When I looked back up at her she nodded her head as tears started to stream down her face. While I was speaking her step-dad looked up at me and he just shook his head and put his head down like he wasn’t going to receive what I was saying. As I continued to speak he picked his head back up and looked at me and nodded.
He brought me through a lot. There’s a lot that the Lord has done.
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