I SAT IN THE OLD WOMAN’S living room. It was a gaudy block home. The walls were outdated pastel colors, á la 1986. She was smoking menthols.
She knows she shouldn’t smoke, her daughter wants her to quit. Eventually, the old woman says she will.
“Quitting smoking ain’t hard,” she said. “I’ve done it hundreds of times.”
She is 93. By her own admission, she’s never been religious. There are no Bibles in her house. No cute embroidered scripture verses on the walls. She’s tough. You can see it in her face. The lines on her cheeks tell the tale of a life spent in the company of hard work.
She worked in cotton fields when she was a girl, in Georgia. She worked in a textile mill when she was a teenager. She survived two husbands. One of which abused her. She raised six kids. And she did it without any help, thank you very much.
She tapped the four-inch ash on her menthol 305. “I always thought, ‘Hey, if God’s real, he damn sure don’t care about me, so why should I care about him?’”
And that was her philosophy. She didn’t bother God, and he mostly stayed out of her way.
Her mind changed when she turned 50. It was a pivotal year. The doctors found breast cancer. It was a cruel joke on God’s part, she said.
Here was a woman who had raised children, who was about to retire. She had finally reached a time in life when she was supposed to be on Easy Street. And along comes aggressive ductal carcinoma.
The woman pauses, then falls into a coughing fit, which finishes with her spitting a gob of mucus the size of a regulation softball into a handkerchief.
“I thought I was as good as dead.”
The old woman says she lost her will. She quit trying. She woman freely admits she did not want to live anymore. And while she did not actively try to end her own life, she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about prolonging it.
Then something happened.
It happened late in the evening when she was leaving work at the mill. She clocked out. She got into her station wagon. She was driving through the ink darkness, smoking, listening to the radio, crying.
Something shot across the highway in front of her. An animal of some kind. Bigger than a dog. Smaller than a deer.
She swerved. The car fell into a skid. The vehicle collided with the guardrail. She tumbled off an embankment and into the icy December waters below.
“My car was filling up fast,” she said. “I was about to drown, I was trying to get out, but I couldn’t. My knees were pinned in. This was the end.”
And all at once, she realized that she did not want to die. There was fight left in her. She did not want to leave this earth. Not yet. So she said a word to the ceiling as her car sank into the river water.
“Help.”
What happened next happened fast. So fast she can hardly remember it.
A young man opened her car door. He pulled her from her vehicle. He dragged her to safety. He had a beard. Long hair. He was either a hippie, or a Grateful Dead band member.
“He wasn’t panicked,” the old woman said. “He was totally calm, like he went around rescuing people from submerged cars every day.”
The man laid her on solid ground. She was drifting in and out of consciousness, but she managed to say, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” the man said.
And then he was gone.
It goes without saying that no witnesses ever saw a strange, bearded Jerry Garcia. When first responders placed her into the ambulance, it was because a local officer had spotted the mangled guardrail and found the accident.
“So,” I asked the old woman. “Who do you think that man was?”
The lady just looked at her cigarette for a moment. “I think he was the same one who healed my cancer.”
Thanks, Sean. That was great, as always. I am glad the lady found out that God loves and cares for her very much.
Dear Sean,
You may find that it doesn’t take much of a trigger to get a story out of me.
Oh! What a great story of a visiting Angel. They are real. They are there when we need them. I have 2 stories like this:
My sister was on a mission trip with the youth in her church - it was a 14 place van pulling a trailer full of tools for the work planned. Someone came barreling onto the highway in a poorly timed merge and tinked the trailer. The less-experienced driver began fishtailing worse and worse until the van and trailer rolled over three times, landing top down in a ditch. My nephew, a large kid was in the seat row behind the driver next to the door. He and the adult man next to him were hanging by their hips from their properly snugged seatbelts. The adult helped my nephew down without breaking his neck and encouraged him to kick the mangled side door open. The two helped everyone get out. Good Samaritans stopped and first responders soon arrived. All was chaos. As things quieted, my nephew said, “Where’s my Mom?” My sister had been in the way back on the left. As the van rolled, the window was broken. She was on the other side of the van, half in, half out, pinned by the wreckage, and gasoline raining heavily on her. She seemed unresponsive. They broke this to my 15 yo nephew and he ran around to see. There was a beautiful woman in a pretty dress with stockings and nice shoes, sitting on her heels in the ditch’s muck and slime with my sister’s head out of the nasty ooze resting on her lap. She was breathing. My nephew reported this and the group swarmed to the other side to see what seemed a miracle. The EMT’s flew into action and she was rushed to the hospital. That was 18 years ago and after a long recovery, my sister enjoys a happy life, recently retired. She has heard everyone describe the beautiful lady who disappeared from the scene, even though everyone realized she had saved my sister’s life. They all knew my sister would wish to know her and thank her. She was gone. My sister reports a long visit and talk with Jesus. She was so worried for her family getting along without her. She pleaded with Him to let her stay. She woke up in the hospital in ICU with a serious brain injury and chemically burned head to foot by gasoline. It took some time to heal and a lot of work, but she continues to take care of her family.
My visiting Angel story is not so dramatic, but just as real:
Before retirement I was a professional pilot. This day was a relatively short layover in Paris. It was only about 3 hours of daylight to to tour and explore this amazing city. I planned to go see where the Bastille used to be. It’s not there anymore. During the French Revolution, the people destroyed every brick of the hated place. “A Tale of Two Cities” is a literary favorite of mine. I was just coming around Notre Dame, making good time after a 2 1/2 mile walk. I was almost there. A misty drizzle was falling, but my new raincoat that folds to the size of a softball was doing its work brilliantly. All along the streets of Paris, there are metal covers for access to the Metro (what they call their subway system). Travel tip: in wet weather, those metal covers get slick! Suddenly, in the shadow of Notre Dame, less than 1/2 mile to where the Bastille used to be, I was airborne. I saw both my feet out in front of me as my tailbone was coming down hard. There was nothing to do. I landed on my tailbone and tried to break the landing with my hands. Ow. I laid there a moment, then tried to sit up. Nope! I rolled over and somehow managed to get to my elbows and knees. Breathtaking pain, every inch I moved. This is bad. I put my hands down and amazingly, the hand that had been holding my phone (my map) was still holding my phone. The phone was perfect, but the side of my hand was raw meat. My right hand couldn’t support me. My palm was scraped and my wrist was visibly swelling and I could put no weight on it. I was puzzling this dilemma when suddenly two sets of hands were on my arms pulling me upright. Whoa! I looked to (who I know because I know) my Angels. They were a man and a woman, maybe a few years older than me by their white hair, but fit and agile. As they spoke to me in English, I noted a familiar Ohio accent. Well that’s a coincidence in Paris! I was born and raised in Cincinnati. They made sure I was able to stand alone before they’d let go, but they stayed with me to question my next move. I was still facing my direction of travel. I realized it was going to take me a lot longer to walk the 2 1/2 miles back than it took to get to this spot. Darkness would fall. I don’t like being out and about by myself after dark and plan all layovers accordingly. Oh dear. Where the Bastille used to be was going to have to be put aside. I inched myself through an about face under the careful observation of my Helpers. I told them my intention and the new plan. The lady said, “You have to take the Metro.” I explained that my French stinks and that I can’t read the signs or understand the announcements. The two conferred a moment and the lady rooted around in her big purse. She came out with a Metro map and a ticket. Then they discussed routing. The man pointed out that stairs would be painful with my obviously painful injury to my posterior region. I listened to that and almost felt sick at the very idea. They came to the conclusion that I needed to walk a little further to a station that would give me a direct ride to near my hotel, which they were miraculously familiar with. It was settled without my input. They gave me turn by turn instructions to the station about 1/4 mile away, over the one a little closer that would mean a train change. They circled on the map where I was and where I was going. Properly briefed, I started to understand the wisdom of their strong urging. It would be full dark by the time I walked back. If I tripped and fell again, I might not have anyone come and help me like this. I rooted in my purse and retrieved my wallet to pay them for the ticket. They saw what I was doing and held my hands from digging in my bag, protesting noisily at my wanting to repay them. I was too hurt and too sore to argue. I gave in and said, “Thank you.” They waved it away and pointed me in the right direction and I tried a few tentative steps. I could do this. I heard them turn to go the other way. I said, “Thank you, God,” and had a sudden realization of exactly who or what those lovely people were. I turned around to call to them again or just to see them. They were gone. The street that way was deserted. I continued my mission, got back to the hotel safely, sore, exhausted, and so grateful. I made it to work the next day and determined during the preflight that the only thing I couldn’t do was turn the radio knobs with my sore wrist. Everything else worked as normal. Even sitting was normal. Getting up and getting down was dicey for a week or so but I could still fly the plane, thanks to my beautiful Angels.