I was driving from Tempe, Arizona to San Jose, California, about a sixteen hour drive, as I recall, and I drove through the night because my little Volkswagen bug had no air conditioning and in early summer, you do not want to drive though Arizona without A.C. in the day time. Of course, I could have stopped and stayed at a motel or at least pulled into a rest stop instead of flirting with death and taking the entire sixteen hours in one big chunk, but I was in my twenties, and I was healthy, and I was daring, and I was a marathon man, and I was a complete idiot who did not deserve the extra special grace God was about to bestow upon me.
Around dawn, while driving along the coast of Santa Barbara, I fell asleep at the wheel and later woke up, still driving, still free of any road accident or danger. I am not sure how long I was asleep but I distinctly remember waking up. Still somewhat punch drunk, I continued driving until I reached San Jose. The next day, after getting my much needed rest, I remembered something that had slipped my mind in the middle of all the madness and fatigue.
All of us have had the experience of lying in bed, starting to doze off and then waking back up. For a moment or two, we hear voices and suddenly realize they were the voices from a dream because for a moment, we had started to drift off. Such voices came into my head on the road but the magnitude of the experience was lost on me at the time because I was sleepy and not thinking right. Later on however, I remembered the voices distinctly.
“Do you think we can keep him awake?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll keep him awake.”
In the first chapter of Hebrews, the Bible promises Christians that they indeed have guardian angels looking out for them. I am convinced I met my own guardian angels for the very first time that day. But when I say it was the first time I met them, I do not mean to imply that this was the first time they got me out of trouble. That, I’m sure, is an experience they have been familiar with for many, many years.
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