As a teenager, my major life-altering traumas were generally self-inflicted, like flunking a test for which I hadn’t bothered to study, getting dumped by a girlfriend whom I’d totally ignored to hang out with my friends, or the tragedy of all tragedies: damaging my car because I liked to drive like an idiot.

I guess Jason was a popular name in the early 1970s, because there were like ten of us in the small Colcord High School class of 1992.  As was commonplace and foolish at the time, my buddy Jason B. and I decided we needed to drag race after school; his dark blue ‘67 Mustang Fastback against my ‘86 IROC Z28.  The gauntlet had been thrown down and the challenge accepted.  Old school verses new.  3:30 at the “Colcord Drag Strip”, which was just a straight stretch of a two-lane blacktop outside city limits that rarely saw the presence of state troopers or county mounties.  The starting line was marked by an old wooden fence post with a catfish head tastefully perched on top and the finish line was marked a quarter-mile(ish) away with a freshly spray-painted white stripe across the road (and another catfish head on the adjacent post).  As we unnecessarily “warmed up” our street tires at the starting line, somehow our cars came together, with the other Jason’s chrome bumper creasing all the way down the passenger side of my shiny black Camaro.  It may have been my imagination, but I swear I saw dark clouds rolling in and heard thunder in the distance, an ominous signal that the seventh seal had been broken and the apocalypse had begun.

The mental devastation was overwhelming after seeing the bumper-sized dent down the side of my car coupled with the sudden realization that we were going to have to explain this to our dads.  We carefully crafted an overly complicated and far-fetched story about an unavoidable accident in the school parking lot, possibly involving a deer running into our paths and a slick spot on the pavement that made it totally not our faults.  We had our rock-solid explanation locked in, but that didn’t fix the damage to either of our cars.  Working up the courage to pull into my driveway, I sat in my car with tears in my eyes, believing that my world had ended.  Earth shattered – how will I ever recover from this?

Looking back, I’ve had a very blessed life and all of the perceived life-altering events of my youth weren’t really that important in the long run.  Our dads believed the fabricated accident story (or at least acted like they bought it) and I did recover from the trauma after a few extra shifts flipping burgers at Hardee’s paid for a new door panel and some paint.  I continued to do stupid stuff, but I learned that maybe I should think before I act because doing stupid stuff tends to be expensive.  As I aged (and hopefully matured), I’ve had my share of ups and downs, successes and failures, good times and bad.  I know I’ve learned a whole lot more from my mistakes than I did from the successes and I know I’ve gotten stronger as a result of the hard times.  Romans 5:3-4 says “We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance.”  Similarly, James 1:2-4 says “Consider it pure joy… whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance“.  Suffering is not meaningless, because it builds perseverance.  Over time, continued perseverance builds character and a strong foundation in character leads to hope and strength.  Like a sapling bending in the wind as it grows builds strength to survive a real storm when it’s a mighty tree, going through adversity makes you tougher and hopefully wiser.  The minor adversities early in life build the strength that you’ll undoubtedly need to survive the real adversities as an adult.

I grew up (mostly) to become a cop and Jason B. went on to become an amazing auto body tech, literally becoming a world-renowned restoration expert for late 60s Shelby Mustangs.  Maybe the adversity of our wreck motivated our career choices; Jason B. gets to repair the damage caused by dumb kids doing dumb things and I try to catch the kids to prevent the damage from occurring.  Or maybe he just loved old Mustangs and I sought a career that let me legally drive fast with lights and sirens.  Either way, we both recovered, our worlds didn’t end, and we hopefully became stronger, wiser adults by learning from mistakes.