The Accident That Saved My Life: Finding God in the Worst Week

The Last Night He Thought About God

Tunde Lawal was twenty-eight and had exactly the life he wanted: a good job in a Lagos tech company, a new car, a girlfriend, and the comfortable conviction that he was doing fine without any help from religion. He had been raised in a church-going family and had drifted out of faith in his early twenties, not dramatically, just gradually — the way you drift from a conversation when your attention is elsewhere.

He was driving home from a colleague's birthday party on a Thursday night. He was not drunk — he was simply tired and distracted. He misjudged a bend on a Lagos-Ibadan expressway overpass and lost control. The car hit the barrier. He does not remember the impact.

What He Woke Up To

He woke up in Lagos University Teaching Hospital with two broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, a concussion, and a face full of glass fragments. He also woke up alive — which the medical staff told him was, given the condition of the car, unlikely.

His mother was sitting beside the bed when he opened his eyes. She was not crying. She was praying quietly, her lips moving, her eyes closed. He watched her for a moment before she realised he was awake. And he felt something he had not felt in years: the specific, embarrassing awareness that someone had been watching over him when he had completely stopped watching for them.

"The first thing I thought," he says now, "was not gratitude. It was shame. I thought: I have been living as if I do not exist to God, and here is a God who apparently did not get that message."

The Week in the Hospital

He was in hospital for five days. His mother brought a small Bible and left it on his bedside table without comment. On the second day he picked it up — not out of conviction but out of boredom. He opened it at random: Romans 8:28. "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."

He read it several times. Then he thought: I do not love God. I have not thought about God in years. This verse does not apply to me. And then: but what if it could? What would it mean to be someone to whom this verse applied?

By the fourth day, he was reading more deliberately. By the fifth day, he had talked to his mother about what he was thinking — and she had told him about a church near his apartment in Lagos that she had been quietly praying he would attend for four years.

What He Found

"I expected to feel judged," he says. "I had been away for six years. I expected to feel like I had to earn back a position I had vacated." What he found instead was something that reminded him of his mother's face in the hospital: unhurried, unsurprised, already waiting. He was welcomed as if he had only been gone a week.

Three years later, Tunde leads the young professionals' fellowship at that church. His broken bones healed. His collarbone still aches in cold weather. He says he is grateful for the ache. "It is a reminder," he says, "that the worst week of my life was the week God decided to stop being polite about whether I was going to pay attention to him."