After a severe car crash involving serious injury to himself and the death of a friend, Dylan is left with nothing but Christian Community and his relationship with God. Through this, Dylan earns some key insights into God's ability to heal.
I went to church for the reason of fulfilling what my mom wanted us to do. She wanted us to go to church, and we didn't really know why. We didn't know what it meant. And we were just going, like I said, for the donuts and for the fun and to meet people.
I was also pretty young, but growing up through the years, I ended up just slowly falling out. Nobody in our family really kept going, and we ended up actually leaving that church.
And my older brother Billy actually moved into a house for this church they called ministry houses. It's a great opportunity to grow in your walk with God.
I ended up seeing a Zoom call for a high school group one time, me and my older brother Billy, we sat in on it and we listened to it and I saw them in the background playing basketball after the teaching. While we were discussing one of the questions.
I asked him about it, I was like, Why are they playing basketball? Why are we sitting here? Like, Let's go there, let's go play some basketball. The very next Sunday, we ended up showing up for Home church and we had the teaching. It was really cool, was beneficial.
I understood it much better than I did for the college group. I was able to understand the words better and understand the message better. And I actually heard one of the most clear gospel teachings that I've heard yet.
A little bit after I started going out to this high school group, it was January 2021 where I actually heard the gospel many times and decided to take that into my own life. I started a relationship with God and I asked for Jesus's death on the cross to apply to me.
A lot of the things that I pursued in my old life before I started a relationship with God was attention from girls or it was sports and it was affection from people.
It was money and working and trying to be the best part of myself. Until I actually started a relationship with God, I didn't realize that that stuff didn't matter that much.
So I was actually on a retreat with our high school group, December 2022. We were driving to go on a hike with some of the friends in the group. Me and my friend Andrew and our friend Gus. We're driving to this hike when we came around a blind corner. There was a truck and there was our car and we collided. We got in a really bad accident.
It all was kind of like a blur in the beginning, but thinking back on it, I remember a lot of details. The time right after that was frantic. Getting in the ambulance and getting life flighted from the first hospital was...was some of the worst time of my life. It felt like it was a year, even though it was only a ten minute ride.
Quickly after this, in the second hospital I arrived to, my brother actually gave me the news that Andrew passed away on the scene of the accident. This was some of the worst news I've gotten. Losing a best friend was very hard.
And actually being there for when it happened was even harder.
For the month, month and a half after the accident, I was suffering a lot. There was a lot of mental and physical things that I was going through, and I really didn't know if I was going to make it out. I was trying to put my trust in God, but I didn't really know how.
I ended up suffering with two compression fractures in my back, a bruised lung, severed spleen, and a chronic fracture in my neck, along with a concussion that was most likely the worst part of it.
Knowing that he wasn't going to be showing up to this Bible study, knowing that he wasn't going to come over and visit or see me at this house that we used to hang out at all the time was very difficult and it definitely helped me understand more of what I was going through to the deeper level.
Soon after this, it was hard to keep following God, it was hard to understand that what I really wanted was to just get closer to God. A lot of my friends just turned away from him. A lot of the people in the Bible study that also knew Andrew and that knew what we had just gone through gave up on it.
They had left and they had stopped going to the Bible study and they had stopped caring about their relationships with God. And that was really hard for me to see. I understood soon after this what I really needed here was God. I needed to get closer to God and he wanted to get closer to me.
So soon after this, I kind of realized that I really needed God. I realized that God was there for me, and I realized that I needed to put my trust in him. I couldn't go around and play sports. I couldn't go out and seek affection from people. So I was sitting in my room with nothing to do but a puzzle. I had people coming over to visit me and actually had my birthday soon after that where people ended up coming over and just sitting on my bed and hanging out with me.
And that's what really mattered to me. It was cool that although I was at one of the lowest points in my life, I still had the body of Christ and the community around me that really cared.
I think this really helped me understand that putting my trust in God was what I needed to do. God was there for me through this whole time, although I couldn't leave my house and I had people visiting me when they can, there were times where I was by myself and when I didn't know what I was going to do that day.
I was laying around in my bed. But I had Scripture, I had the Bible and I had God to talk to. And that was the biggest part.
Right after I graduated, I was able to move out, into this house with five other guys that all cared about growing in their relationships with God.
It was really cool living with people that had the same moral values as me. It was cool to be challenged every day. It was cool for people to be supportive and serving. Yeah, it was a really strong environment to be around.
I think having God behind me in this area has been very, very strong. I think about going through this car accident without God there with me would have been terrible. I would have been depressed for years and I wouldn't have been able to do these things that I'm doing today.