Our mortality is front and center in this Sunday’s readings, as the psalmist reminds us that God turns us “back to dust,” while Ecclesiastes speaks of days of “sorrow and grief” and Jesus tells the parable of the shortsighted rich man who apparently forgot that the day would come when the Lord would say to him “this night your life will be demanded of you.” Though we normally don’t think about our mortality when we get behind the wheel of our cars, the sobering truth is that more people die in car crashes each year in the United States than in any other developed nation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report.

In 2013, more than 32,000 people died on U.S. roads, roughly 90 fatalities a day, according to the CDC. While the United States has seen a 31 percent reduction in its motor vehicle death rate per capita over the past 13 years, the United States has the slowest decrease when compared with 19 other wealthy countries that declined an average of 56 percent during the same period. Road death rates in countries such as Spain and Denmark have dropped 75.1 percent and 63.5 percent, respectively.

If the United States had reduced its death rate to the average of other countries, 18,000 more lives would have been saved, according to the CDC report. The United States also performed badly in other measures. It ranks first in crash deaths per 100,000 people and per 10,000 registered vehicles. It's the second-highest, after Canada, in the percentage of deaths involving alcohol (at 31 percent). And the United States is the third lowest, after Austria and Belgium, in national front seat belt use (at 87 percent) among the 20 countries.

“It is important to compare us not to our past but to our potential. Seeing that other high-income countries are doing better, we know we can do better too,” Dr. Debra Houry, director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, said in a news release. “People of our nation deserve better and safer transport.”

The findings come in the wake of another alarming federal report on traffic deaths, which found motor vehicle fatalities in the United States spiked 7.7 percent in 2015, jumping from 32,600 in 2014 to 35,200 last year, according to preliminary data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Houry acknowledged the startling statistics but called it a “winnable” public health battle. “We can do better, using strategies we know work,” said Houry, who is also an emergency room physician. “It’s really important to compare us not only to our past, but our potential.”

Lessons drawn from the readings

The reading from the Book of Colossians encourages us, even in the face of our human mortality, to “think of what is above, not of what is on earth” and to remember that the story doesn’t end with our physical mortality, and that in fact we already “have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory.”

Final thought in light of the news

We clearly can and should do better in terms of highway safety. Cracking down on drunk driving, texting on the road, and careless driving is a must. But while we need to keep our eyes on the road for sure, we also should keep our eyes on the prize. We live and die and live again in Christ.