(The following is a true story. Lynn and Sandi Bliss were traveling from Traverse City, Michigan, to Detroit to take their son, Victor to the airport. Victor had just finished his first year of College, and was going on a mission trip to Germany.)
Somehow, Sandi managed to free herself from her seat belt. She opened the door and eased herself down to the ground. The effort alone forced her to sit for a moment, her back resting against the side of the car. Slowly—shock-numbed and dazed—she pushed herself upright and looked across the front seat toward her husband.
Her head was clouded from striking the windshield moments earlier, but even through the haze she understood what her eyes were telling her. Between the crushed steering wheel and the ruined seat, there was no space left for life.
Her heart broke in that instant. But she could not stay there.
Her children were in the back seat.
Victor, twenty-two. Anne Marie, twenty. And Dane Tate—one of her many “unofficially adopted” sons—had been sitting there as well. But from where she stood, Sandi (Peaches, as Lynn had called her for twenty-four years) could not see him. Fear tightened around her chest. There was no movement. No sound.
She whispered their names, barely louder than breath. She had little strength for more. I once read that we cough to clear our throats, but we sigh to clear our hearts. I can almost hear that sigh when Anne Marie’s eyes fluttered open and found her mother.
Sandi moved closer, urgency pressing through her pain.
“How badly are you hurt?” she asked.
“How is Victor?”
“Where is Dane?”
Love is the most powerful source of strength. It drives people to heroic lengths—to sacrifice life, limb, and comfort—for country, home, or family. In Sandi’s case, it was love for her children that held her upright. The desire was ordinary. The doing was not.
With a badly broken leg—one that should have made standing impossible—along with a broken arm, internal injuries, and a head wound that would soon prove fatal, Sandi stood. She asked questions. She listened. She steadied her children with her presence.
“Don’t look at your father,” she whispered, tears filling her eyes.
But they did.
Victor, briefly conscious, and Anne Marie both looked. The angle of his head. The crushed, bloodied face. The eyes already closed in death. Their own pain and shock kept tears at bay, but the image etched itself into memory forever.
How she managed it, only God knows, but Sandi leaned into the back seat and prayed with her children. Later they would call it “just a jumble of words,” but surely God heard and understood (Romans 8:26–27). When she finished praying, she asked again about their injuries.
Anne Marie spoke of pain that would later be diagnosed as a fractured tailbone, cracked ribs, and internal injuries.
“Vic’s leg is broken,” she added. “And his hand hurts.”
Sandi then found Dane curled on the floor between the seats. The unnatural angle of his arm made the break obvious—crushed, really. Surgeons at the first hospital nearly amputated it, stopping only because he had to be transferred immediately to evaluate his transplanted kidney. By God’s grace, the second surgical team rebuilt and saved the arm.
Satisfied that her children would live, Sandi turned back toward Lynn.
“I need a blanket to cover my husband,” she told the good Samaritans who had begun to gather. Someone placed one in her hands. As she rounded the car, she noticed a young man across the road—pale, shaking, nearly undone by shock.
Her own pain—and even the thought of Lynn—fell away for a moment. A mother’s heart compelled her forward. She forced her broken body across the road and draped the blanket around the young man.
He had been the passenger in the car driven by the nineteen-year-old who, racing his friends, had attempted to pass on a hill. At the crest, metal twisted, glass shattered, and their vehicles met head-on.
If thoughts of blame crossed Sandi’s mind, she never revealed them. Her love covered their dreadful carelessness.
By then, the helicopter and paramedics had arrived. They tried to load her onto a stretcher. She allowed them to lay her down, but she would not leave until someone covered Lynn. A paramedic took a blanket, did as she asked, and reported back.
Sandi looked toward her children and spoke her last words.
“I love you, kids.”
Moments later, she closed her eyes.
The apostle Paul wrote, “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Sandi lived that truth to its fullest measure. Love enabled her to endure what no body should bear, to comfort others while dying, to forgive while bleeding, and to bless even those whose actions had brought harm.
With love, enemies are overcome, sorrows endured, and quiet heroism revealed. With love, even the oldest tyrant—Satan himself—is cast down. We know this because Love Himself, Jesus the Christ, came as the ultimate manifestation of God’s love (1 John 4:9–10), conquering sin, death, and the devil once and for all.
Lynn and Sandi nearly always spent his day off visiting. They went from house to house, checking in on friends, brightening ordinary moments. After a while, Lynn would rise, settle his baseball cap on his head, and say, “Let’s go, Peaches.” Sandi never argued. She stood, offered her hugs, and followed him home.
Shortly after the accident, from the far side of death’s door, it seems Lynn spoke once more: “Let’s go, Peaches.” And from a bed in the dim ICU at Munson Medical Center, Sandi’s spirit rose. As she had always done, she followed Lynn home. Faith, hope, and love united them in eternity.
Her final request to her children had been, “Don’t look at your father.” She wanted to spare them that sight. There is, however, one Father from whom we must never turn—the Eternal, gracious, all-loving Father God.
He is Love.
And love is the greatest.