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Saturday, June 27, 2010, a 6-month-old baby girl was killed and her mother seriously injured when the pair were struck by a falling tree branch in New York City's Central Park Zoo. The girl's father was taking their picture near the sea lion exhibit when a branch above them suddenly snapped off and fell.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007; nineteen year-old Ramiro Gonzalez was returning home to Nyssa Oregon from a week-end honeymoon in northern California with his bride Idalia asleep in the back seat when their 1997 Pontiac Grand Am hit a cow twenty miles east of Burns. The Pontiac went off the road, through a fence, and burst into flames. Idalia escaped with only minor injuries, but Ramiro died at the Ste. Charles Medical Center in Bend the very next day.
Ramiro and his bride didn't get to live in a home of their own for even one single minute of their marriage-- never had a baby, never joined the PTA, never saved for college, never went to ballet lessons, nor to soccer or little league, never went on family picnics, never took home movies and photos at Christmas, Easter, or birthdays, never went to the beach and built sand castles --no, their entire future, and all their dreams of family life, were shattered in an instant by a lame-brained bovine; and Ramiro wasn't even 20 years old yet.
March 20, 2008; fifty-seven year old Judy Kay Zagorski, of Pigeon, Michigan, was sitting in the front seat of her father's boat going 25 knots on the Atlantic Ocean side of Vaca Key in Florida, when a Spotted Eagle Ray, with a wingspan of 5 to 6 feet; leaped up out of the water-- for who knows what reason --and collided with Zagorski, knocking her backwards onto the deck of the boat. She died from the impact. Judy's sister, standing next to her, wasn't injured.
On a November morning in 1998, Alan Pakula climbed into his Volvo station wagon and began the 100-mile drive from Manhattan to his Long Island house. The acclaimed movie director of Sophie's Choice, All The President's Men, and The Pelican Brief, had made that trip countless times with no incident.
As the 70 year-old Pakula neared exit 49 on the Long Island Expressway just before noon, the tires of a vehicle ahead of him flipped a 7-foot piece of steel rod into the air. Within seconds, the rod shot through Pakula's windshield, smashing into his forehead, killing him almost instantly.
Death often comes when people least expect it. As a rule, they don't usually get up in the morning planning it to be their last day on earth. The 169,752 killed, and 127,294 listed as missing in more than eleven countries by the tsunami of 2004, were taken by surprise, and given no warning it was to be their last day on earth.
The 2,829 people who perished in a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the 189 who died in the Pentagon, didn't go in to work expecting their lives to end before lunch that day. No, people's lives often end while they still have obligations and commitments, aspirations, things to do, places to go, and people to see; when a car accident, train wreck, act of nature, plane crash, crime, heart attack, or stroke puts an abrupt end to every plan they ever made.
Tuesday, Jan 12, 2010, a 7.0 earthquake struck Port au Prince Haiti right out of the blue subsequently causing the loss of more than 200,000 lives. A similar act of nature on March 11, 2011, left 25,000 dead and/or missing in Japan.
Okeechobee woman Dawn Johnston, 38, was killed Wednesday June 30, 2010 after part of a portable toilet crashed through her car's windshield. Dawn was driving south on SR 15 shortly after 11 a.m. when two portable toilets fell from the trailer of a pickup truck traveling north,. The portable toilets shattered when they hit the road, and a piece of one of them crashed through the woman's windshield, striking her. Johnston's car then veered off the road and collided with a tree.
A rain-saturated hillside above the Stillaguamish River on the outskirts of the rural town of Oso in the State of Washington gave way March 22, 2014 leaving behind a current death toll of 41 souls. The landslide happened to suddenly and so rapidly that nobody saw it coming and/or had the slightest chance of getting out of the way. Listed among the dead and missing was a four-month old infant.
Freak incidents like those listed above can happen to anybody in the form of a stray bullet from a drive-by, lightening strike, gas explosion, choking on a piece of meat, electrocution, earthquake, a drunk driver, a fall in the bath tub; bricks dropped from an overpass, a school shooting, or any number of out-of-the-blue surprises.
Because of the uncertainty of tomorrow, people need to start thinking about the afterlife today, while they have the chance; rather than risk being caught off guard by sudden death when there will be no time to think; and they find themselves suddenly thrust into the unseen world quite by surprise.
● Ecc 9:12 . . No man knows when his hour will come: as fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.
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