Two Miracles

Every life has its lucky moments and surprising coincidences, and mine has been no different. I remember driving through a red light somewhere in Kansas when I was about eighteen years old. I had never seen a stop light on a pole on the side of an intersection, they had always been hanging from wires in the middle of the intersection. In that lucky moment nobody was crossing in front of me and I sailed right through the intersection. The three guys I was traveling with were petrified, as I was when they pointed out what I had done. And there have been other similar moments when I've escaped harm or death, or just barely avoided a bad consequence.

But there have been two experiences in my life that are just so incredible, so amazing, so “no way” that I put them in the category of a miracle.

The first occurred during a vacation trip to Los Angeles. I've had back problems intermittently for some time, usually minor in nature and my chiropractor keeps things in good shape. But towards the end of this trip my back went out badly. I spent the day before my scheduled flight back home laying in a hotel bed, barely able to move. Just turning from one side to the other involved several minutes, a lot of sweat and intense pain. This continued into the night and the next morning. There was no way I was going to be able to walk, much less sit on a plane for four hours. Laying there I remembered the position my chiropractor sometimes puts me in for an adjustment, and decided to try to lay in that same position, on my side with the top of one foot placed on the back of the other knee, pushing my hips forward while turning to push my shoulders in the opposite direction. I laid there for 45 minutes in that position. Then I got up with no pain, carried two suitcases down steps to the rental car and flew home without a further problem. My higher power was watching over me.

The second miracle was equally unexplainable and fortunately did not involve pain. My girlfriend, now my wife, had travelled to Paris on a business trip and bought a beautiful watercolor painting at the Sacre Coeur. She rolled it up, tied it and protected it throughout the trip and carried it back on the plane to avoid damage. I picked her up at the Cincinnati airport after her long flight back, then we had dinner and went to a high school football game to watch her son play. It was past midnight when I dropped her off at home, but with the six hour time change, it was more like 6:00 am to her, and she was dog tired. After unloading her luggage, I took off for home, about a fifteen minute trip including a stretch of 55 mile per hour rolling country road. I was less than a minute from when she called my cell phone. She couldn't find the water color and was sure she had left it on the top of my car. She looked on her driveway, lawn and even down the street a bit, but it was gone. She called to see if I had it, as impossible as that could be. When she told me what happened I was struck hard with the need to immediately stop the car and look. And it was there, on my trunk. The edge of the paper had caught between the trunk lid and the car body, folded over and was pinned there by the airflow over the car. It had got stuck and folded over so perfectly that the paper did not even have a crease on it. I remember telling her that, astonishingly, that I not only had painting but that it had suffered no damage at all. It hangs proudly in our house, a daily reminder that miracles do happen.