Note: I tried to post this Sept. 15, but it didn’t show up until about five days later on my blog, so I am republishing in a new post. Let’s see how this works.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Dearest Readers: If you have been hanging around here for a few years, you know by now that our family (Mom, Dad, and four-year-old me) moved from Pennsylvania to Dixie, Alabama, a small community 25 miles from the nearest town, Andalusia, back in 1952.
* * * * * * * * * * * * **
The community consisted of our little church. There were no stop signs, no stop lights, and no Main Street, unless you count the main road where the church and the country store stood.
Daddy would be the Pastor of this church.
We had been settled in our “new” Southern home (also on the main road through town) for about a year when things went sideways.
Mom told me this story many years later. There was a controversy going on, and somehow Daddy got on the “wrong side of things.” She never shared the issue with me at the time – and I never asked later on. I wish I had.
One day, a man approached my Dad and said, “Harold, you are lucky you had someone with you last night when you were driving.” (home from Andalusia, 25 miles of dark county road).
“Why is that? What do you mean? I didn’t have anyone with me,” replies my dad.
”Oh, but Harold, some men were waiting along the road for you, and they were going to rush out into the road, get you to stop, and do something to you. But there was someone in the car with you, so they let you go.”
“But I didn’t have anyone in the car with me last night.”
“They saw someone.”
Dad and Mom could only conclude that God sent an angel he couldn’t see or caused the men who meant him harm to see something/someone that wasn’t there. Word must have gotten around. No one bothered or tried to bother the Yankee preacher again.
And so, Dear Readers, I simply leave you with this story. We accepted it as God’s protection. Why doesn’t God always “protect us”? I can’t know His ways. All I do know is that he is with us, in the broken world we live in, during the good times and the hard times. And sometimes he doesn’t intervene, and sometimes he does. That’s what I know.