Seek The Lord While He May Be Found

A Story About A Man Who Died Very Suddenly In His Twenties

I was prompted to document this true story described below (that I have been “sitting on” for many years) after seeing a post on Facebook with the following hypothetical question, which you may have heard before:
 

Someone is lying in the road bleeding to death and asks you, “What must I do to be saved?” and they have 60 seconds to live. What would you say to them?

 
Rather than addressing that question, this story is targeted more towards a related issue: What if YOU are the one who is bleeding to death with 60 seconds to live? Would you even have time to do anything? What you SHOULD DO, as the Bible tells us, is to never wait until it’s too late, but instead:
 

“Seek ye the Lord WHILE HE MAY BE FOUND, call ye upon him while he is near” Isaiah 55:6.

 
I actually ran into the situation – posted about in the question on Facebook – over two decades ago. A man bled out (and died) in front of me in the span of about 10 minutes, in his sister’s car after a car crash. He didn’t really have time to seek the Lord. His time had run out.
 
It was a day I will never forget. At the time, my home was 3 houses in from a highway. It was a bright sunny afternoon. I was in my front yard when I heard a loud crash. I ran out to the highway, and saw a car turned backwards (facing the oncoming traffic) with a man hanging out the passenger window and his blood pouring down the side of the car door. I had to hop over the center divider to get to him. I took off my shirt to see if I could use it to stop the bleeding but he was a mess, his nose was gone (smashed in from the looks of it) and his right ear had gotten sheared off. Incredibly, in that short time it took me to get to the car, an off-duty paramedic was already at the car. He had been in a store on the highway right where the accident occurred. Somehow, the paramedic had gotten the man’s name during that brief moment in time before I got to the car. All I can remember saying to the man was: “Ask Jesus to save you.”.
 
The paramedic asked me to help him get the man out of the car and place him on the ground. As we started to lift the man, the man’s skin on his right shoulder was hung up on the door lock button (which was actually just a threaded rod with the decorative botton missing). We got the man free from the door lock and placed him gently on the ground on the shoulder of the road. Traffic had stopped and we were waiting for an ambulance.
 
An ambulance came within about 5 minutes but they did not have a suction device to suction the blood out of the man’s nose and he was bleeding from there profusely. Within another 5 minutes a second ambulance came by that had a suction device but it was not working. By that time the man had died anyway. It was such a brutal head injury that the man most likely would have died even if he crashed right outside of a hospital emergency room.
 
By the time the man had expired, I noticed a young woman crying in the back seat of an older woman’s Honda sedan parked parallel to the crashed car, in a parking lot right along the highway. As it turned out, the young woman was the dead man’s sister, who had been driving drunk at high speed and had crashed into a parked car on the shoulder of the road, causing her car to turn 180 degrees, and causing her brother’s head to hit the roof pillar on the passenger side of the windshield. That woman basically had just killed her own brother. What a load of guilt to have to live with the rest of her life.
 
I was quite in shock about what had just transpired, by the blood and gore right before my very eyes. When the police arrived I was pretty bloody from having lifted the man out of his car and was told by the police that I should not have done what I did, because the man might have had AIDS. A crowd of onlookers stayed around for a while even after the ambulances and the police left the scene. I remember witnessing to those folks, while yet bare chested and covered in blood. I must have been a sight to behold… but what more appropriate time to witness to others than at the scene of a sudden death where God surely had the attention of those bystanders with respect to the matters of life and death.
 
When the story of the accident came out in the local newspaper I found the young woman’s name and was able to send her a letter and a Gospel tract but never heard back from her. She may have gone to jail for the death of her brother. But where is her brother now? If he died “in his sins” without the Lord Jesus Christ as his savior, then he died under the eternal wrath of God, and will be regretting the day that he was born, for all eternity. What about YOU? What are YOU waiting for? Sudden death comes to many people unexpectedly every day… a car crash, a fall, a heart attack, a violent crime, a work accident, etc. I had a cousin who died in his sleep at age 19 and he had no history of sickness or disease. None of us are guaranteed another day on this earth. That is why we ALL need to “seek the Lord while He may be found”. — RM Kane
 

“Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.” Luke 12:40