A man on a bicycle was just hit by a truck down on the street below our 3rd story window. I heard the tires screeching and the crash of metal against metal and jumped up from my desk just in time to see sparks and then the truck driver jump out of his vehicle. The man is laid out on his back, it looks like he might be moving or twitching, but he doesn’t look very conscious. His bike is under the truck’s front right tire.
Now there is a huge crowd of mostly Muslim locals from the neighborhood all around. It has been 10-15 minutes since impact and the ambulance is just now arriving. I hear the sirens and I see the ambulance pulling up right now.
Pray that this man makes it through. I can’t see from here what kind of shape he is in, but it can’t be good.
Pray that people would learn that life is short and that we need Jesus TODAY because we don’t know what tomorrow might bring.
I am writing this at about 8 a.m. Central Standard Time on Monday morning from my house in NW China. It is 9 p.m. Monday evening here.
UPDATE:
It is now 10:49 p.m. China time. The 66 year old Muslim man who was hit by the truck did not make it. It looks as if he died nearly on impact. I went down just after writing the first part of this blog and they were trying to resucitate him, but they gave up within a couple minutes and the Muslim family and friends took over the care of the body.
Evidently, the driver of the truck was not a Muslim and was quite drunk at the time of the accident. The gatekeeper of our apartment building, also a Muslim man and a distant relative of the deceased, was sitting outside the gate on the street when everything happened and was basically the first person on the scene.
It has been two hours now and the street below is completely devoid of people where just an hour or two ago there were literally hundreds crowded around the accident scene. The body was caried away on a wooden stretcher to the family’s home, where some Muslim clerics performed the appropriate rituals. I followed them to near the door of the home about a quarter mile away, but wasn’t able to see or hear much of what they actually did.
The broken bicycle and truck are also gone. The only evidence left that anything happened is a street full of glass that noone cared to sweep up. Somehow the whole front windshield of the truck got broken in the accident.
So now it would be good to pray for the family of the man. He has a wife and grown children. And for the neighborhood and this city that is dominated by Islam. The saddest thing for me is not that someone has passed away… but that is was a Muslim who died and not someone who already knew Jesus.
Pray that Jesus would truly be made known among the millions of Muslim Chinese living throughout this region!
