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The first time I truly felt the hand of God on my life was in the late 70s. I was on my motorcycle riding home from work. It was after midnight, traffic was light and we were moving fairly slowly. The taxi in front of me suddenly swerved to the kerb and stopped, forcing me to swing wide to avoid his back, and I found myself in the opposite lane staring down the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. I closed my eyes and thought “Lord, here I come”. Then I opened my eyes as the vehicle flashed past. Cynics have said it was just the driver reacting quickly to my movement while at the same time I had unconsciously pulled my bike away. Believers will understand why I breathed a sigh of relief and a word of thanks to God as I continued my journey home.
Another time, alone in my room in the middle of the night, I was struggling with God. I forget what it was about, but I remember that I was in tears. When I opened my eyes, the room was pearly white, and I just felt a sense of peace. Again, there have been those who said the whiteness was just the tears in my eyes, but my thinking is that if God appeared in my tears of anguish, it was a pretty neat thing to do. Then there was the time I went camping with a couple of youth leaders from the YMCA. Jude Marcal and David Chan were like mentors to me, Jude being the camping expert. There I was loaded down with my camping gear, complaining about the summer heat and clear blue sky that accompanied us as we hiked to our destination – unused paddy fields where we would set up our tents. As I put my things down and crumpled to the ground, I said “A cloud, Lord. Just one cloud. PLEASE!” And wouldn’t you know it? From our left, a cloud appeared. We were in a cove, so this great big black cloud rolled in over one hill and headed for the other. David said, “You got your wish”. HA! That cloud dumped several inches of rain over a half-hour period and drenched us, and we had to laugh as our camping gear started floating away from us. As the cloud moved off and the sun came back out to dry us off, Jude told me, “You’d better be careful what you ask for, because you might just get it!” Yes, God has a sense of humor, and I wasn’t the only one to experience it. A friend of mine shared this story with us. He said he was rushing to catch a ferry to one of the outlying islands and was caught in traffic, so he prayed that the ferry wouldn’t leave until he got to the pier. When the bus finally arrived, he jumped off and went racing down the pavement, three minutes late, and there was the ferry in all its glory. As my friend breathed a word of thanks, the vessel started pulling out, leaving my friend stranded. And he burst out laughing. He had asked that the ferry not leave until he had reached the pier, and that’s exactly what happened! Published: August 28th, 2005 My Sunday Examiner Articles
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