Held By Angels.

This may be impossible but I want to try to go way back into my childhood and tell one of my earliest painful stories. I estimate I must have been about four or five years old because I don’t think I had started school yet. I can see myself as a little boy that night in the early 1980s, with dark brown hair, in an over-grown bowl cut that hung down past my eyes. I was sitting next to my mom in the front seat of a lifted Toyota pick-up truck. She was driving and one of her boyfriends who owned the truck, was on my left sitting shotgun. I don’t remember his name, but I remember his face and I know I liked him. He was pretty nice to me and let me hang out, unlike most of her other friends.

My mom was young and partied a lot, and I just kind of hung out with everyone. A lot of people didn’t like a little kid hanging around, but this guy was always cool with me tagging along. And his truck was awesome! This was in the 80s when big trucks weren’t really a thing yet. He had a brand new lifted 4x4 with a big shiny chrome roll bar, big KC lights with the classic yellow smiley faces, totally decked out with gauges and meters and a killer sound system. The truck was over the top, but I thought it was really cool. Whenever this guy would pulled up to the house, everyone would come outside, gather around his truck and listen while he would tell us all about it!

So one night they were partying… I guess… I really don’t remember how we got out there that night, but my mom had convinced him to let her drive his baby out in the hills for a little off-road fun. My mom loved driving the dirt trails up and down the hills in the high mountain desert of Nevada. I have numerous memories of being terrified in the front seat of a vehicle with her as she mashed up the mountains with deadly drops on all sides. This night was worse though, because while the hills were much smaller, she was driving extremely fast!

We were in the hills outside of Hawthorne, Nevada, actually within eyeshot of a sheriff department ironically, maybe a few miles away. I just remember sitting in between my mom and her boyfriend in the front seat of that 4x4 hauling ass through the sage brush that night! The truck was bouncing around so violently from the sequence of small hills we raced over that it was throwing us around in the cab of the truck. My mom just laughed and drove faster through the desert, but her gaze was numb… and I was scared to death. All I could see was the headlights jumping up and down as the truck flew through the air over and over, seeming to pick up momentum with ever bump. This is when the world stopped.

I guess to be exact, the world did not stop, but it slowed to an absolute crawl. My reality or at least how I perceived reality for the next several moments moved at a speed of maybe 3% of my standard everyday reality. This happens in life in extreme situations, like right before someone is born or right before someone dies. For some reason, when we are thrown into crisis, it appears as though time stops. I am not sure if it is our perceptions that deceive us, or if we do not actually perceive clearly in these times when our life flashes before our eyes. At any rate, I was very young to be experiencing something so traumatic, and this is the way my brain chose to store the memory.

So the truck is now bouncing out of control, and my mom is still driving faster and faster through the moonlit desert night. All of a sudden, everything just stops…somehow it all goes silent…we even begin to float through the air mysteriously! It was like a scene on a space movie, when the astronauts first experience zero gravity and begin to float around the spaceship. It felt just like this! And I can remember the stuff in the truck lifting into the air, also no longer held by gravity. And for this moment in time we were just floating through the air in total weightlessness.

At this second, it felt almost comforting to just be gliding softly though the air because the thrashing of the road was finally over. I then noticed that we weren’t just floating anymore, but now we began spinning, first slowly, as I locked eyes with my mother for the first time. She had finally snapped out of her drunken gaze and now had this look of terror and fear in her eyes! It was only then that I realized we were in danger, but I was still not afraid. I was being held tightly in place, just out of harm and completely safe.

The spinning picked up speed and soon reality came back in an instant. The silence was abruptly replaced by breaking glass, and my mom screaming in terror. I now saw her smashed and bloody and it looked like the top of her head was cracked wide open. The mangled truck was flung like a rag-doll and cartwheeled a half a dozen time end over end. My mom looked like she was dead, and I didn’t know where her boyfriend was. I could not move for some reason, so I laid there in the wreckage with my mom and I just closed my eyes.

The next thing I know, I am being carried away from the wreckage by police officers, and my mom was going frantic! I was completely unharmed, but she was badly injured in the accident, as well as her boyfriend. While they led me out of the scene, she was fighting with the police and screaming for them not to take me away. This was the last time I saw my mom for several months. I was taken to a police car, they shut the door and drove away.

I don’t know where I went from there, everything just goes blank after that. The next clear memory I have is at the foster home I stayed at while my mom was in jail. Not exactly sure how I got there, or if I went to the hospital, but I knew I was okay. My mom always told me I was safe that day when we wrecked in the big truck because I was being Held By Angels. I always believed her too because it was the only reason I could see as to why my mom and her boyfriend got so bloodied and battered by the accident, and the truck get mangled as it flipped countless times, and yet I did not receive a mere scratch.

I looked at this event from that day forth as evidence that God was looking out for me. I somehow knew in my heart that I was so special to God, even unique somehow, that he would deploy a fleet of angels to rescue me from this terrible accident. For that matter, I still believe this fact to this day. If you were in the truck when it was spinning violently through the air and then walked away from a gruesome car accident site without even a bruise or a tiny cut you would believe in angels the way I do.

Today, some 35 years later I still ask God for this same kind of divine protection, now over my own four boys as well as my wife and I every single day. While life has proven to be hard and even too much at times, God has proven to always love us and He has always kept us safe through it all. It is this reason that strengthens me to press on without fear, and instead be assured that God has a plan for my life and it is good, and He will do whatever it takes to see me thru this life and fulfill His purpose in me. Even if that means sending a fleet of angels to hold me safely during a horrible car crash.

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