Throughout my childhood, through raising children, and having grandchildren, our bunch has surely kept the guardian angels busy. My daughter tells of a time she was talking on the phone at their rural home in Mississippi, while her little 2-year-old girl played in the next room. As Amy talked, she was vaguely aware of honking horns from the busy road, from which their house sat back some seventy-five feet at the end of a long driveway. "What could be going on?" she wondered, when suddenly there was a knock at the door.
"Lady, is this your baby?" a flustered stranger asked, with little Rachel under his arm. "She has been walking along the road in front of your house and cars are stopping to avoid hitting her!" Our daughter was dumbfounded and overcome with relief, realizing what might have been! Apparently our little granddaughter had found the screen door unlocked, pushed it open and went for a stroll, unbeknownst to her mother!
Several years earlier, when my oldest daughter was raising small children, it was her turn to praise God for His protection. They had a cabin on some river-front property they owned, and one day Bethany, about three years old, somehow wandered off without her parents' knowledge. I don't remember if someone brought her home, or our daughter found her. But she was discovered a long way from their cabin where she would have to have pass within inches of a surface-level, unprotected swimming pool and several other camps scattered along the winding, up-hill lane. When noticed, she was running alongside a large dog. There was no doubt that it had kept her from danger. Sometimes it seems God lets animals have wings.
My own parents could testify of many hair-raising experiences with us children, but I remember one incident from when I was about five. (This is not when I was run over by our horses!) Mama and Daddy had gone to town, leaving my teen-age sisters to baby sit the younger children. It was a beautiful summer day, and the girls had put a quilt on the ground for the baby to play on, and we were all sitting around on it in the shade of a big tree, idly plucking little flowers from the grass and talking.
Well, I was mostly listening to their chatter, when I saw our four-year-old brother get up and walk toward Daddy's pickup truck. I can still see him in his little overalls, the strap tied through a button-hole where the fastener was missing, ambling along in his familiar walk. He climbed up in the truck. I thought nothing about it, and I don't know if my older sisters even noticed. A while later, though, Bobby climbed down, and a few minutes after that, we noticed smoke curling up from the cab and out the windows.
They ran for the neighbor's house, and a man came running with a fire extinguisher. But by that time, flames were licking through the windows and smoke was pouring out. It was too late to save the truck. It was a charred ruin by the time Mama and Daddy got home.
Evidently, Bobby found some matches, struck them, and maybe burned his finger, dropping one onto some papers on the seat which caught on fire. He didn't tell us what had happened, we could only surmise. But, Praise God, he got out of the truck in time! Anything could have happened! He might have been unable to open the door in fear and panic (which he showed no sign of, though!).
Our quiet little brother kept mum about the incident, never even acknowledging his part in it. Finally, Daddy bought another truck. When he brought it home, Bobby looked up at it admiringly and said, "Daddy, I'm not gonna burn this one up!" I'm sure Daddy picked him up and held him close, thankful he was safe, but the rest of us teased him about it for a long time. Just another example of God's protection.
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