One spring I travelled by bus from Los Angeles, California, where I was finishing high school, to Amarillo, Texas. It was Easter time. I went there to meet my now-long-gone parents, Peter and Susan Kroeker, my sister Mary and her husband Herman Wilms, and my uncle and aunt, the late Abe and Elizabeth Kroeker. Six of them, comfortable in Uncle Abe’s brand new Buick bought late in the 50s, enjoying a motor holiday.
Uncle Abe had phoned a month earlier to invite me to join the party in Texas the coming Easter weekend. It would be a surprise for Mom and Dad.
After attending a beautiful Easter morning sunrise service (Southern Baptist) in the desert hills near Amarillo, we went sightseeing in the Buick. We drove to a roadside outlook and walked a short distance along a gravel path. Suddenly we rounded a bend and came upon a magnificent cathedral-like cove, surrounded on three sides by rock wall. It was one of those scenic stops you discover along famous Route 66.
We walked around. I began climbing the wall up a way that seemed to lead to the top. There were footholds enough to inch upward, and I was almost there when I came to an outcrop that had no way around. I was tired.
There seemed to be no way up, and everyone knows that climbing down a rock wall is much harder than climbing up, so this was bad…I was frozen in space 25 yards up from the starting point.
I resigned myself to falling, should my strength give out!
Suddenly, it seemed as if someone grabbed me from behind by the belt, lifted me up over the edge and dropped me onto a patch of grass that stretched away from the edge to a green plateau. I sat for a moment, puzzled, then made my way back down a safer way down a path that followed the lip of the eastern wall.
It took a while to get back.
Later, back in the Buick again (it was big enough to hold seven people for an afternoon drive…three in front and four in the back), I told my story to the others.
“Did you see me up there?” I asked my sister Mary.
“Yes, I was at the bottom watching you, and I was praying like mad,” she said.
Did God hear that prayer, and did he instantly send down a guardian angel to grab me from behind and lift me to safety? Would I have fallen, had Mary not prayed?
Questions to ponder.
I must admit, this is one incident in my life I recall in full detail that makes me think God has a computer in heaven that is the granddaddy of all PCs and Apples. Is pushing buttons his favorite pastime? Does he hear the Prayers of the People and respond?
Oh, I see…he knew all the time what was going on…he knew ahead of time I would be in danger, so he put a guardian angel on standby.
I wonder!