Philip Yancey’s Message of Grace
On a Sunday in late February 2007, Philip Yancey was driving on a remote highway near Alamosa, Colorado. As he came around an icy curve, his Ford Explorer began to fishtail; the tire slipped off the asphalt and the Explorer tumbled down a hillside. The windows were blown out; skis, boots, luggage, and a laptop computer were strewn over the snow.
Yancey suffered minor cuts and bruises on his face and limbs and a persistent nosebleed, but he also felt an intense pain in his neck. When an ambulance arrived, he was strapped onto a spinal board, his head was immobilized, and he was put in a neck brace. He was taken to a small-town hospital for a CAT scan. No radiologist was on duty, so the images had to be sent via internet to Australia; when the results came back, Yancey was told he had splintered his C3 vertebrae, although the break had not severed the spinal cord.
The doctor told Yancey they’d perform another scan, this time with iodine dye, to see if a bone fragment had nicked the carotid artery. A jet was standing by to airlift him to Denver if needed.
“But truthfully,” Yancey recalls the physician saying, “if your carotid artery has been pierced, you won’t make it to Denver. So you should call the people you love and tell them goodbye, just in case.”
When I spoke a few weeks ago with Yancey, one of the most popular and widely read Christian authors in America—his 25 books have sold more than 17 million copies and been translated into 50 languages—I asked him about the hour he spent strapped to a spinal board, staring at fluorescent lights, wondering if he was going to die.
“I was conscious, I was in my right mind, not in that much pain, and I had a lot of time to think,” Yancey, whom I count as a friend, told me. Yancey grew up in a hyper-fundamentalist, racist church in Atlanta. His father, Marshall Yancey, was a 23-year-old Baptist minister when he was stricken with polio. He
