Angel Unaware
With Christmas just around the corner, stores are loading their shelves with all kinds of items intended to catch the eye of the browsing grandma, the small children hanging off the shopping cart, and the seemingly uninterested husband tagging along with his wife. One item that often serves as a jumping off spot for Christmas memories is an angel. Some adorn the peak of their tree with an angel, while others think of the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Have you ever noticed how many angels are in just the Christmas accounts? The angel Gabriel appeared to Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, and to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Other nameless angels appeared to Joseph at least three times, and a whole host of angels visited the shepherds.
What would it have been like to be visited by a heavenly messenger? What did they look like? What did their voices sound like? The Bible does not give us any of those specifics, but the New Testament writers spoke of angels, assuring us of their reality. Hebrews 1:13 and 14 speak of them as lower than the Son of God and “ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation.” In Hebrews 13:2, believers are commanded to not be “forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Obviously, this is not an exhaustive study of angels but a reminder of God’s use of angels at times to protect us. The following account is true and no names have been changed to protect any innocent person, except for one, who proved himself to be our ”angel.”
The setting is as follows: a busy summer of Christian camping is coming to a close with a free week before the next camp begins. We live hours from anything in the middle of southeastern Utah, so we head to St. George, about four hours away, to see the musical Mary Poppins. My adult daughter Katie, another staff lady Elizabeth, and I take off from the ranch in a 2002 pick-up that we are assured will make it that distance. (My husband had flown to Canada to assist another ministry but agreed we should make this trip.) I start down the road and comment on the play in the steering. Katie, who has driven the truck a lot, suggests that I am overcorrecting. However, after we exit in St. George with three episodes on our drive down that make me very unsure about continuing to drive the beast, we arrive at my son’s, who has worked on a lot of diesels. It is decided that it may be a tire problem and we plan to get two more new ones the next day. We head to the musical, this time with Katie driving, and she decides that there is more wrong than just my overcorrecting. The next day she and her brother take care of getting the two new tires and then take the truck to a mechanic friend who spends most of the day fixing things not taken care of by others who had previously worked on the truck. The steering box, guaranteed to last forever, has broken again after being replaced before our trip, and there is a problem with the power steering pump. As we leave to return home, things seem better until Katie hits 75 mph where the speed limit is 80 mph. If she goes faster, things level out. That is the setting for the rest of the story.
When we were about an hour from home, we started climbing up the canyon and the check engine light popped on. The gauges all read normal, so after a call to my husband to ask him what to do, we started on our way since he said that light normally pops on
when starting up the mountains. But fifteen or twenty minutes up the highway, things started happening. The power steering, brakes, and engine quit simultaneously, with gauges lighting up. With great care, Katie was able to get the truck stopped on the side of the road, with flashers going. This is not just any road. It is Interstate 70, the primary highway to connect the West with Denver. Because it climbs through a moun-tain pass, the many truckers going through do not want to lose their momentum, nor were we sure we wanted just anybody to stop as we were parked in a precarious spot on a bend in the road. By this time, it was 9:30 and quite dark. To top it off, we had called my husband at the last place there is cell phone service.
Katie climbed up on the truck, lifted the hood, and with cell phone flashlights, she and Elizabeth discovered oil spewed all over the engine. Elizabeth thought maybe she could venture the over 1/2 mile to an exit where we sometimes pick up cattle that has been gathered off the mountains. I did not want her trudging alone through the dark on the side of a steep incline with no way to make sure she was OK. Katie put in more oil, hoping to remedy the problem enough to limp home. After trying the truck again once it seemed cooler and after trying to wave down someone to help us for at least an hour, I told Katie and Elizabeth that they could go together. That definitely gave me time to pray and ask God for His guidance and protection. After what seemed for-ever but in reality was about another hour, they ventured back, the light of a cell phone bobbing in the distance. Of course, in a situation like this when you have no way to get help, you ask God for a miracle.
After more than another hour of our waving flashlights and white pillow cases, Katie climbed into the bed of the truck, ready to climb on top of the cab to see if she could get at least one bar on her phone. Right then, a car came up behind us and stopped.
As a man got out of the car, he showed the girls a badge and something in his wallet as I looked for some paper to write contact numbers on for him to call once he had service. By this time, it was well past midnight and even darker. Once I joined their group, I said to him, “So you’re some kind of law enforcement?” As he pulled out his wallet and flipped a badge at me, Elizabeth said, “He’s an FBI agent.” “Oh,” I said, af-ter looking things over. About then I was thinking, “Should we get in his car if he of-fers?” and he offered to move some stuff around so we could all fit into his car. And no, he didn’t look like an angel, nor did he actually look like what we imagined an FBI agent would look like. But independently, each of us concluded that this was the only way to get help. Otherwise, no one would know we weren’t back until no one was at church to open the doors or play the piano! To top it off, he had passed us once but could not get over fast enough. He went all the way to the off ramp the girls had walked to, got back on the interstate to go back to the off ramp which was the one we had called my husband from, and then traveled those miles to get back to us. He had planned to get gas about an hour up the road, but taking care of us had cost him his gas. Twenty minutes would get us to our off ramp and another fifteen minutes would get us to a one-pump gas station in a small town fifteen minutes from where we lived.
Needless to say, we conversed quite a lot. He found out what we all did and we asked him what he did. He had been in LA for some training and had picked up a dirt bike from a friend in the area where I grew up, all of which sounded plausible. Oddly enough, the Lord gave peace beyond measure that we would be safe with him. Katie told him she had prayed for an angel and God sent him, to which he replied, “I’m glad I could be good for something.” Once we got to the gas station, he filled up, shook our hands, made sure we had reached someone who was indeed coming to get us, and took off. By this time, it was after 1:30 in the morning. One of the two guys working with us at the ranch drove Elizabeth’s car to her so the two of us could head home while Katie jumped in a truck with the two guys so they could go pull the truck off the road where it would be safe until the next day. By 3:30, the event was over and, hopefully, our “angel” was almost to his destination.
One thing he said has stuck with me: “I stopped because I knew I was the most quali-fied and safest help for you.” Again, we thanked him for being our answer to prayer, a man obviously provided for us by God. We gave him our ministry website, and whether he looked at it or not, we’ll never know. But we pray that someday someone will share the gospel with him and he’ll think about that time some girls in the middle of Utah called him their “angel.” We will never forget him and God’s provision. True, we know he was a human source of help. But to whom can we be a help and answer to their prayer—an “angel unaware”?
In the next two days, the truck was wenched onto a trailer and hauled back to St. George to the mechanic. He fixed the main problem, an oil pump explosion, test drove it, and had trouble steering it, too, causing him to do a very thorough overhaul of the truck. Every time he called my husband to tell him what else he had found, I thanked the Lord for His miraculous protection. “The angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them. O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him” (Ps. 34:7, 8).
