Writer: Chris Ahrens | Photography: Bil Zelman
It was the mid 1970s, a great time to be young and healthy, especially if you were one of the top surfers in California and being paid to do what you loved best. Brew Briggs was running at the front of a burgeoning pack of pro surfers, leading a life that most kids only dream of, growing up on the then pristine beaches of La Jolla, California, and picking the numerous fruits of the earth. With model-good looks, amazing athletic ability, and the Pacific Ocean as a playground, he had it all. Yet if you asked him today about the greatest times of his life, those days wouldn’t even garner honorable mention. Instead, he would take you to a day that most others would consider tragic, a day he doesn’t entirely remember because he had slipped into a coma, a day when his wife and four children were hurled through space and caught by hands that don’t let go. But this is not just Brew’s story, it is the story of Sheri, the wife he loves, and a united family that celebrates Memorial Day, not because of those who died, but because of those who lived and now mark out a time that none of them will ever forget.

Risen Magazine: Give us the details of your accident.
Brew Briggs: We had been living in Bend, Oregon, when I got the call that the Windansea Surf Club had a spot for me in a team competition in Santa Cruz. We had been in Oregon for about six months and thought, What the heck, let’s have a little family vacation. We had a great time and decided to head home on Sunday.

Sheri Briggs: We spent that night in Lake Shasta and the next morning went to breakfast. The kids were all happy, we went hiking by this beautiful waterfall, and everything was perfect. We got into the car and I took the wrong turn that put us hours behind schedule. When we got within about two hours of home, we had our shoes off, and we let the kids lay down, for the first time ever, without their seatbelts.

RM: How old were the kids?
SB: Lilly was two, Emily was five, Nathan was just turning eleven, and Eric was fifteen.
BB: We stopped at a gas station and pretty much the last thing I remember was buying Eric a candy bar. I took over the driving, and the rest of the story has to be from Sheri.

SB: We had only been on the road about fifteen minutes. It is a little two-lane road with Klamath Lake on one side and this cement barrier on the other. We were cruising along at 55 or 60 miles per hour when suddenly I looked ahead to see a car pulling into our lane, coming right at us. There was nowhere to go. I screamed, Brew swerved, and we hit the car. I was completely aware, thinking, Oh my gosh, what a big crash, and I kept wondering when it was going to end. The next thing you know, I’m sitting on the side of the road, and I have Lilly, my two year old, in my arms. I have my eleven-year-old son, and I couldn’t get to my other daughter. The first thing out of my mouth was totally from the Holy Spirit: “No weapon formed against me will prosper.” It was like I yelled it out from the side of this road. Eric was in the van and Brew was on the other side of the highway, on the lake side, underneath the van.
    The kids and I had flown approximately fifty feet, and Brew, who knows? Miraculously, our insurance adjuster was in the car right behind ours. He came to our house two weeks later and was able to tell us that when we hit the car, we flew straight up, flipped once in the air, came down, hit the side rail, and flipped two more times.

RM: I heard you describe it as like a flock of little ducklings on the side of the road.
SB: I don’t know how, but I grabbed my baby. I was covered in glass, but my kids didn’t have any at all. Because of all the glass in my body, I believe that I was thrown through the window and that they all came flying next to me. It appeared to me that the Lord had just laid everybody down. Lilly didn’t even have a scrape, but later they found a very minor fracture to her skull that they said happened in the best possible place. My son had scraped all of the left side of his body, from the top all the way down. He was just one big, bloody mess, but it was superficial and he was fine. I was yelling, �