The road curled along the ridge like a question mark, nothing but a sharp drop beyond the edge. Jessica gripped the tattered armrest. Adan gave her a quick look. “Relax, my love.”
She tried to give a calm smile. Then the tires hit ice. In an instant, the old Chevy rolled, once, twice, metal shrieking. On the third spin, Jessica was thrown, flung into the dark. Her body slammed against the frozen slope. She felt the crack of breaking bones. She looked down at the canyon and saw Adan, half in, half out, as steel crushed inward where the wreck finally stopped. She called out, but only silence.
Until blackness, the struggle for air brought her back. She lay coughing and crying.
She prayed, “Lord, help me.”
Years of erosion had stripped the canyon’s edge bare. Jessica would have to drag herself up through raw earth to reach the road above. She saw sagebrush. Adan knew the land. She remembered him saying, “Sagebrush has deep, strong roots anchored in the rocks. It knows how to survive.” Blood in her mouth, she grabbed a handful and pulled herself up, one silvery bough at a time, and out onto the icy black road. She had no idea how far help was. Only that Adan was gone, and she needed to be like sagebrush.
***
She pushed onward. Her neck sparked when she moved. Her knee was useless, full of gravel and fire, dragging behind her. Breathing felt wrong. Heavy. Thick. Too loud. Something deep inside had caved. Her head pounded slowly and steadily. She threw up.
One mile. The cold numbed her fingers, then her feet. Her mind wandered, remembering her father’s laughter the day she announced she was going to be a bird, the feathers she taped to her arms, the way she jumped off the porch, fearless. He laughed so hard he cried, amazed that something so small could believe so big. Right then, she missed her mother. Her mother was the calm force in stressful times.
Two miles. She coughed up blood in the snow and kept moving. She saw Adan’s big smile the day he proposed to her at the Boise State Broncos playoff game. They won. He said, “This is a good sign of things to come for you and me, Jess.” She recalled that morning, how anxious he was to get on the road so they could beat the cold weather heading their way, and now it was beating her. The sun had gone down as if it did not want to witness anymore.
Three miles. Her broken knee screamed. Every breath was a sharp blade pressing deeper. She collapsed. Lay still. Eyes closed. Let the dark come. But then she remembered the sagebrush and what it meant to root yourself to the ground for strength. So, she crawled, stood, walked, barely.
Four miles. Warm blood trickled down her leg. She could hear her grandmother’s final words, “You keep your heart with Christ, Jessie-bug, no matter where life takes you. He’ll never let you walk alone.” She was at peace when her vision tunneled.
Five miles. A dim light. A house standing in the black. The shape of a porch.
She stumbled to the door and tapped the wood with torn ice for fists. The porch light swam in and out of focus. The door opened.
A man in flannel. Pale face. Eyes wide. “Dear God.”
She clutched the frame. “My… husband. Blue Chevy. Ridge.”
“Where?”
She fought to speak. “Near…the pines.”
He was gone, running. Boots pounding. His farm truck roared away.
Then a woman appeared. Barefoot. Blanket in hand.
“Sit. You’re okay, dear. Sit right here.”
The warmth of the wool wrapped around her made her feel safe.
“Yes, emergency. She walked here. Accident up on Targhee Ridge, one still at the scene, she’s badly hurt, please hurry.”
Jessica heard pieces: sirens. Helicopter. Her name. Coordinates.
Then the thump of blades. Lights in the sky. Wheeling her off the porch. Kind yet urgent voices.
Hands lifted her. Needles found veins, and medicine heated her body. Oxygen began filling her broken lungs.
“This is a broken neck,” someone said. “She walked five miles?”
The helicopter rose, wind pounding. Jessica closed her eyes. She let herself go.
***
White walls. Hallways too quiet. Beeping monitors. Steady blank faces.
A doctor said, “We needed a miracle here.” She tried to nod and smile, but something didn’t feel right.
Time moved strangely. Nurses never appeared. No visitors. Her skin felt as thin as air. Pain moved through her like a memory already forgotten. She considered that maybe it was the trauma. Or the drugs. Or the grace of God. God. There was a longing for Him she hadn’t known before. She remembered a verse: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil because You are with me.” She hadn’t expected it to feel so surreal.
She wandered the halls. They seemed too long, too empty. Doors led to rooms that looked like traces of the past. Now she knew she was dreaming. One was her childhood bedroom. Another held the scent of Adan’s pancake breakfast. A third was filled with sagebrush, growing out of the tiles. She sat among them and said, “I believe.” She had a great sense of assurance the moment the words left her mouth, because all the evidence had revealed itself long ago.
Her childhood pastor had explained the gospel so clearly that she could still hear his voice and recall her tears that flowed at the mention of Jesus. She had prayed for her best friend in college to come to faith in Christ, and when she did, it was the most joyous moment.Adan’s mother and father, once skeptical, had clung to Scripture in their final years as if it were breath itself, and her own parents, whose knowledge of the One in whom all things exist was always being lived out for her as a witness.And on their trip to Israel, they had stood in the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem; she ran her fingers along the stone. She marveled in its empty claim. Jesus, real then and real now, the source of all life and death, stands with her still. Her whole life had been lined with extraordinary evidence. The Kingdom of God was at hand. The Author and Finisher of her faith was present.
One day, she found a mirror. Her reflection didn’t appear. The realization came like seeing the first snow falling softly during winter. She was dead but alive in a new divine realm. She left the canyon only to shortly cross over. Every mile brought a flash of her life. Just like they say it does near the end. The porch. The helicopter. The hospital. It was all a veil witnessed by a soul in transit. But now the veil was thinning. Now the fullness of heaven, an unending radiance of everlasting beauty, a holy splendor that no eye on earth could fully bear. She had never felt more alive.
She stepped outside. But there was no wind or cold air. No pull of gravity.
A luminescent warmth that felt like the sun on an early summer morning. Heaven smelled like lilacs and fresh-baked bread. A glorious table was prepared. Not shadow. No longer a glimpse of the place where all questions find their answers. A place so peaceful that fear will be forgotten forever. She felt a hand slip into hers, familiar, warm, eternal. Adan had been waiting for her.
She finally understood what survives. Not the fragility of life. Not the nature of humanity. Not even the will. Only the soul and the love of God. And only by the divine power that created each one with a specific purpose for existence: To love and adore Jesus Christ for eternity. She knew that “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand.” She wept with tears that no longer understood pain, only joy. A perfect new body with no sign of injury or scars. The first things have all passed away. No need for the sun or the moon, for the glory of God has illuminated everything.
And somewhere, far off, the sagebrush held up the ridge, twisted, rooted, reaching down into the middle of the earth, until the fire came. Beyond everything, the canyon opened, not into the sky, but into the eternal presence of a holy God, where both the dead and those still living are held in His Sovereign care.
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