ASA Adventist Society for the Arts
It was a Sabbath morning in late winter as my wife, infant daughter and I set out for church. Though the sky was clear and sunlight shone in the eastern valley, the mountains hid its beams from penetrating into our yard. The late winter thaw had begun a couple weeks earlier and in the Colville Valley most of the snow had already melted. But up in our hills, where the sun had a difficult time to penetrate, the snow lingered.
Though we walked over crusty snow to get to our car, I had a feeling of spring. I knew we had a few miles of ice to drive over but as we had asked our Father to keep us safe that morning in worship, as I knew the road well, driving it to work every day, I was not worried.
I drove carefully, feeling the road, avoiding what I knew to be the worst of the ice as we reached the brink of Feye’s Hill. For about a quarter mile, the road was steep with several curves – the hillside climbing steeply on our right, dropping rapidly on our left as we descended.
We were almost down the hill when on the last corner I felt the car sliding across the road – I realized we were headed off the left bank. I dared not hit the break, couldn’t give the engine more gas, nor did I dare jerk the steering wheel – I sat helpless. I remember saying “Lord help us.”
The front left wheel was on the left edge of the pavement when the forward motion stopped and the car started moving backward across the road. To me it felt like a hand had grabbed the car and pullied it backward. Not only did our car move to the far right side of the road, it moved up hill, the right side slamming into the snowbank with a thud, plugging the tail pipe which killed the engine.
We sat for a few seconds, still a little shaken when the truth hit. Who pulled us up and across the road? There is only one answer, our Heavenly Father had sent an Angel to once again save us.
I could see the ice ended about 100 feet, then the road was bare pavement. I started the engine and staying close to the right side of the road, crept along, finding what gravel I could for the right wheels to roll over until we were on the bare pavement.
There is another part of this story. Later, after the snow had melted, we found the only place along the right side of that road without a deep ditch between pavement and hillside was where we had been pulled. True, had we ended in the ditch, we would not have been hurt but would have been stuck until help arrived. Our Father knew the best place to land us.
Two years after this, the county put up heavy cement bulwarks along the left side of the hill, protecting others from doing what we almost did. Praise God and thank you my Angel.
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