Monday, July 2, 2012

Our World is Not Flat




…and other Big-Fish stories.

As Archangel Michael is my witness and to the best of my memory, such as it is, these following stories stand exactly as they happened all those years ago:

  • I was 8, almost 9, ready to move from Town A to Town B in Michigan where Dad had received a new pastorate call.  One early dawn morning, as I sat on the toilet looking out the window to my right, I saw what I instinctively knew was an angel, wings drawn back the full length of its body, hovering 6 inches above the roofline of the nearby shed.  It scared me so much, I flew off the toilet and raced back to the bedroom without pulling up my panties.

    Within days, a series of almost simultaneous, unfortunate events happened to me, including a ruptured appendix, polio, and mumps...before, during and after the move.  Years later Mom and Dad told me my angel story was more for them than for me. 
    They needed it.


  • Add 10 years, this time while at university.  I walked to church from campus one beautiful, quiet Sunday morning.  Approaching the intersection to turn left, as I always did, a car passing ahead of me in my same direction honked and stopped.  “Would you like a ride?” the church friend yelled.  “Sure!” And just like that, without thinking, I bounded off the sidewalk across the street towards the car.

    Another car driving towards me suddenly screeched in front of me with a woman yelling at the top of her lungs, “ARE YOU CRAZY?!”  The car-out-of-nowhere was ready to mow me down.  Stupid (and dead!) me!  Of course I always look before crossing!

    But just as my bounding, forward momentum broke the plane of the curb, I bumped into an invisible something so strong and padded it threw me backwards onto the sidewalk.  The rest of the day I walked around dazed, in a stupor....

  • Another few years later, son Mark, age 3, was with Bill and me in the front, bench seat of a friend’s old station wagon we had to borrow for a day.  He was sitting by the passenger door playing with the door handle…a chrome open-ended beauty from those good ol’ days.  No worries because I had locked the door…but didn’t remember that if you moved the handle, it would pop the lock.  Within seconds, the door swung open and flung Mark out onto the Pasadena Freeway, at 70 mph.

    Bill’s first reaction was to look into the rearview mirror.  Mine was to just stare at Mark, stunned, and do nothing…until I realized he was still hanging onto the handle!  In an instant, I reached over and pulled him back into the car.  A nurse behind us stopped and said his head never touched the asphalt pavement.  The doctor who x-rayed him said nothing was dislocated and then swore it was a miracle.

    While Mark took a 4-hour (!) nap that afternoon, Bill and I shook in our boots.  Not even an adult could have hung onto a slippery, open-ended handle while being dragged on the freeway, let alone a 3-yr-old kid.  Someone was holding his hand!  “Though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the LORD upholds his hand” was the Psalm Bill randomly found during a meditation later.

Forgive the analogy but guardian angels for me are a bit like good big-fish stories.  Just as real, outlandish, embellished and totally believable!  And I bet we all have them. 

Kinda makes me want to go fishing again!  You?

[The windmill is taken through a 3cm clear-glass oculus and then turned upside down.]




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