In his first semester at Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, my husband, Bob, began driving school bus, first as a substitute driver, but within two weeks he had his own route. One spring morning, he picked up the last of his fifty junior high students and was driving fifty miles an hour up Route M in the Ozarks just south of Springfield, Missouri, when suddenly his right front wheel went rolling down the highway ahead of the bus!
"That's when the Lord took over as driver," Bob said.
All he could do was hang on to the steering wheel and pray as the disabled bus careened down the road into the ditch, missing a culvert pipe by a fraction of an inch. If the axle had connected with that culvert pipe, the bus would have flipped.
It had rained for a day or two before the accident, softening the earth in the ditch.The driveway over the culvert funneled the bus squarely into the soft ditch, slowing the bus, keeping it upright, and preventing the gas tanks from catching fire. The front wheel wells inverted as the dirt pushed up into the undercarriage. Bob saw that and was sure his legs would be broken, but the bus came to a stop just in time.
If you've ever ridden a bus full of junior high students, you know they are a noisy bunch. That morning, during the accident those students didn't make a sound. You could hear the proverbial pin drop. Bob quickly instructed several larger boys to open the back door and help all the students jump out. The bus was totaled, but no one was hurt.
The investigation revealed that when the bus had been serviced, the cotter pin that keeps the large nut in place that holds the wheel on had not been put back on. The wheel had gradually worked its way over until it came off.
A member of the school board and a reporter for the Springfield newspaper were driving behind the bus and saw the entire accident. Bob was commended for safely wrecking a school bus!
Later, Bob drove me along his bus route to show me where it had happened. The accident occurred on the only straight-of-way on the entire route. The rest of the way was full of hairpin curves, drop offs to rivers below, bridges on curves. If that wheel had come off at any other spot on that road, there would have been a terrible tragedy.
Coincidence, you say? I believe God was watching over my husband and that bus load of kids. The Lord "redeems me from death" (Psalm 103:4, NLT).
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