"If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."

Like most teenagers I looked forward to my sixteenth birthday as a day of liberation. Being sixteen meant that I could get a driver’s license, and the open road of freedom and self-determination would be mine for the taking. At last, I thought, I could be my own person, no longer dependent on parents or older friends to take me where I wanted to go. My sixteenth birthday would be "Independence Day," "Bastille Day," the day of liberation.

A couple of days before that long-awaited anniversary, I was with my family as we returned home from an evening out. I don’t remember where we had been, but it was nearing midnight when the four of us turned onto the highway leading to…