Copyright © 2002 by Karen Kingsbury
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Warner Books, Inc.
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First eBook Edition: April 2002
ISBN: 978-0-446-55026-0
Contents
Introduction
Angel in the Intersection
At Every Game
Letting Go
A Child Shall Lead Them
The Gift of Dance
Rescued by an Angel
A Dream Come True
Whatever It Takes
Heavenly Reminder
The Miracle of Good-Bye
The Miracle of Life
A Phone Call Home
On Angels' Wings
Angel in the Darkness
The Littlest Angel
Karen Kingsbury is also the author of A Treasury of Christmas Miracles
Her fiction titles include:
Halfway to Forever
On Every Side
A Time to Dance
When Joy Came to Stay
A Moment of Weakness
Waiting for Morning
Where Yesterday Lives
To my Prince Charming, Donald, and our six beautiful children, Kelsey, Tyler, Sean, Joshua, EJ, and Austin. I treasure every moment with you and count our days each a miracle.
And to God Almighty, who has, for now, blessed me with these.
Introduction
Women are a busy lot, rushing through the days trying to manage a dozen different roles. We are mothers, daughters, friends, neighbors, counselors, house cleaners, chauffeurs, cooks, caretakers, and dreammakers. Often we are responsible for the wellbeing of everyone in our own little worlds.
But in the rush of life we rarely take time to revel in the miracles around us—the living examples and awe-inspiring proof of God's love.
• The baby that should have died but lived.
• The child saved from a pond without a trace of the goldenhaired rescuer.
• The paralyzed young woman who walked down the aisle a year later and married her high school sweet heart.
• The angelic reminder that even in death, God is there.
Miracles abound if only we take time to look.
It's been said that we women were created with a relationship manual built into our hearts. But we are nothing more than harried, hassled, dried-out machines if we don't take time to allow our souls to sing again. Time to sit qui etly in the presence of God's miracles and be reminded that he is still working among us.
In the next few hours, give yourself permission to smile and cry. Allow the goose bumps as you drift back to a sim pler time when faith was as certain as breathing and mira cles were easy to see. Allow yourself the faith of the little girl you once were, a heart that might appreciate a blazing sunset or a blanket of stars stretched across a desert sky.
Remember, you are a miracle to someone else. You, all by yourself, are a precious reminder of God's love to the people in your life. How much better, stronger will those relationships be once you've allowed your heart to be renewed?
And when you're finished journeying through these miracle stories, when your heart is lighter and you've been reminded of the miraculous proof of God's love, pass this book on to someone else. A soul like yours.
Someone who needs to believe again.
As always, I'd love to hear from you. Please email your miracle stories or other comments to me at
[email protected], or contact me at my Web address, www.karenkingsbury.com.
Angel in the Intersection
It was the last day of school and Melba Stevens was waiting with fresh-baked cookies for her sevenyearold son Mark to come home. She sat in a chair by the window and thought about the conversation she'd had with the child that morning.
“Mom, are there really guardian angels?”
Melba had smiled. Lately Mark had been almost con stantly curious about spiritual matters and this was merely the next in a list of questions he'd asked lately. “Yes, son. There really are.”
He had taken a bite of his cereal and thought about that for a moment. “I'll bet my angel's huge, don't you think so?”
Melba had stifled a laugh. “What makes you think that?”
“Because I'm the kind of kid who needs a really huge angel, that's why.”
Melba chuckled to herself now, thinking of the way Mark's eyes grew large when he talked about his overly large guardian angel. Silly boy, she thought. Silly and sweet and tender enough to make up for the wilder side, the side that would never back down from a challenge.
Mark was their only child, a special gift considering the fertility problems Melba had experienced. Doctors thought she'd never be able to conceive and when Mark was born they'd had no choice but to perform a hysterectomy. There would be no other children, but that was okay with Melba and her husband. Mark was a very special child and more than enough to fill their home with love and joy and laughter. Melba smiled as she thought of the fun summer they had planned.
“Hurry up and get home, Mark … your mama's waiting,” she whispered. Then she went to the kitchen to pour him a glass of milk.
Two blocks away, the children were walking home from school and Mark Stevens was in a particularly giddy mood.
“Summer's here!” he shouted.
“Yahoo,” his friend shouted. Then the boy looked at the four lanes of traffic ahead of them. “Watch this!”
With that he ran across four lanes of busy traffic and jumped onto the opposite curb unharmed.
“Come on,” the boy yelled to Mark. “Don't be a chicken.”
Mark looked behind him at the sixth-grade neighbor girl who usually walked him home from school. She was distracted, talking to her friend. Mark glanced at his friend once more and hesitated. His mother had forbidden him from crossing the street by himself, but … He blinked hard. “Okay, here I come!”
Then, without checking for traffic, he darted into the street.
Suddenly Mark heard the children behind him scream and he froze in the middle of the road. A fast car was coming straight for him. He tried to outrun it but there was no time.
“Mom!” he screamed. And then there was a sickening thud.
Back at home, Melba felt a ripple of panic course through her. Mark was never late, but now it was seven minutes past the time when he usually arrived from school. She slipped on a pair of sandals and began walking toward the school.
She heard the sirens almost immediately and picked up her pace.
Two blocks away she saw an ambulance and fire engine and a cluster of people gathered around a figure on the ground.
Her heart skidded into an irregular rhythm. Dear God, don't let it be Mark.
Melba began to run, convincing herself it couldn't pos sibly be her precious boy. He would never have crossed a street without looking for cars. But as she ran a memory came to mind of a bad dream Mark had suffered through more than a month ago.
“I'm scared, Mom. Like something bad's going to hap pen to me.” He had tears on his cheeks and she wiped them with her pajama sleeve. “I don't want to be alone.”
“Mark,” she said, “there's nothing to worry about. You're never alone. God has placed a guardian angel by your side to watch over you while you sl
eep and to protect you by day. You have nothing to be afraid of.”
That conversation must have sparked the one she and Mark had earlier that morning.
Melba was almost to the accident scene and she scanned the crowd of children looking for Mark. Please God, put his guardian angel by him now. Please.
At that moment she caught sight of the child on the ground.
It was Mark.
“Dear God,” she screamed as she pressed her way to the front of the crowd. Terror racked her body and she fought to keep herself from fainting. “Is he okay?”
“He's conscious,” one of the paramedics shouted. Then in a softer voice he mumbled, “This is incredible. The kid shouldn't even be alive.”
Mark could hear the paramedics and his mother in the dis tance. He lay on the ground, not moving, but he couldn't figure out what had happened. He remembered being hit and flying through the air. But when he'd hit the ground, there had been no pain. Almost as if someone had carried him through the air and then set him gently down on the pavement. He looked up and saw a circle of people working on him.
“Check his pulse,” someone shouted. “Check the re flexes.”
“Don't move him yet,” another cried. “Check for head injuries.”
He could see his mother, standing nearby, tears run ning down her cheeks. He smiled at her and hoped she wouldn't be too mad at him. After all, he'd been told a hundred times never to cross a street without an older per son to help him.
He looked at the other people gathered around and suddenly he gasped. There, hovering directly over him and gazing into his eyes, was a gigantic man with golden hair. The man was smiling and Mark understood by the look on the man's face that he was going to be okay. As the man faded from view, Mark's mother stepped closer.
Melba watched a smile come over her son's face and she knelt at his side. “Mark, are you okay?” she cried. “Honey, answer me.”
Mark blinked, his face pale but otherwise unharmed. “I'm fine, Mom. I saw my guardian angel and I was right. He's so huge you wouldn't believe it.”
Hope surged through Melba as a paramedic pushed her gently back from the scene. “He's in shock, ma'am. He's suffered a serious blow and he has internal injuries. We have to get him to a hospital right away.”
They placed the injured child onto a stretcher and strapped him down. “He could have back and neck in juries, any number of problems,” another paramedic ex plained to Melba. “You can ride in the ambulance if you'd like.”
Melba nodded and began to weep quietly as they loaded her son into the ambulance. Before they pulled away, she saw four policemen and firemen examine the spot where the boy had landed.
“No blood,” one of them said.
“Yeah.” Another man approached the spot, shaking his head. “The car must have been doing forty plus and the boy sailed through the air. Came down on his head and there's no blood.”
“I've never seen anything like it.”
Melba felt a tingling sensation pass over her as she con sidered their finding. No blood? How was that possible? Then she remembered Mark's words: “I saw my guardian angel.”
She closed her eyes as the ambulance pulled away and prayed the very huge angel had indeed done his job.
At the hospital, doctors did a preliminary check to determine whether Mark had feeling in all parts of his body.
“Look at this,” one of the doctors said, running a hand over the boy's smooth legs and arms. “He doesn't have a single scratch on him.”
“Didn't he get hit by a car?” The nurse assisting him studied the boy, her eyes wide.
“Yes. By all accounts he should have died at the scene. And I can't even find a bruise where the car made contact with him.”
Within an hour the doctor had the results to a dozen different tests and he was stunned at what he saw. The tests were completely normal. The boy was neither scratched nor bruised and he had absolutely no internal injuries.
“My guardian angel saved me,” Mark explained. “That's why I needed a huge angel, Mom. God knew I'd need one like that to keep me safe.”
The doctor was in the room and at Mark's words he shrugged. “That's as good an explanation as any I have.” He tousled Mark's hair. “I'll sign the papers so you can go home.”
Today, Melba remains grateful for the precious faith of her only child. Mark is grown now but remembers the in cident as if were yesterday. After the accident, his young faith became vitally real, propelling him through his teenage years and into a career that still seems as natural to Mark as the idea of guardian angels.
That career?
Youth pastor, working with kids who pepper him with as many questions about spiritual matters as he once had for his mother.
At Every Game
In the town of Bakersfield, California, there was a seven-year-old boy named Luke who played baseball on his town's Little League team. Luke was not very talented athletically and he spent much of his time on the bench. Still, Luke's mother, a woman of deep faith, attended every game and cheered for her son whether he struck out or not.
Life had not been easy for Luke's mother. Sherri Collins was in college when she and her longtime sweet heart married. They lived what seemed like a storybook life until the winter when Luke was three years old.
On an icy highway, coming home from a second job he worked at night, Sherri's lifetime love was killed in a head-on collision.
“I'll never marry anyone else,” Sherri told her mother. “No one could ever love me like he did.”
“You don't have to convince me.” The older woman was also a widow and she gave Sherri a sad, understanding smile. “Sometimes there's just one special person for a whole lifetime. Once that person's gone, it's better to be alone than try to replace them.”
Thankfully, Sherri was not alone. Her mother moved in with her after the funeral and together they cared for Luke. No matter what trial fell upon the young boy, Sherri had an optimistic way of looking at it.
“That's okay, son,” she'd say when Luke came home sad about a situation with a friend. “One day he'll realize how much fun you really are and then he'll be knocking at the door every afternoon.”
Or she'd encourage him when he struggled with learning to read. “You can practice reading to me every night, Luke,” Sherri told him. “Won't that be a nice way to spend time together?”
Sherri had something deep within her that many mothers understand. An ability to recognize the speed at which time passed. Knowing it was flying by didn't make it any easier to stop, of course. But for Sherri, it meant making the most of every moment.
She more than anyone knew how quickly things could change.
When Luke turned seven and joined the town's Little League team, Sherri sensed from the beginning his strug gle. In an effort to make things right for him she researched stories about major leaguers who struggled with the game when they were kids.
“Did you know that the most famous outfielder of all time didn't play a lick of ball until he was twelve?” she'd tell him. And together they'd laugh over the possibilities. “One day I'll be cheering from the stands and there you'll be—suiting up for the big leagues.”
Game after game, week after week, his mother came and cheered him on. Even if he only played a few minutes at a time.
Then one week, Luke came to the game alone.
“Coach,” he said. “Can I start today? It's really impor tant. Please?”
The coach pondered the child before him and thought of Luke's lack of coordination. He would proba bly strike out and swing at every ball that came his way. But then the man thought of Luke's patience and sports manship during the weeks he'd played but an inning or two.
“Sure,” he said and shrugged, tugging on Luke's red cap. “You can start today. Now go get warmed up.”
Luke was thrilled and that afternoon he played the game of his life. He hit a home run and two singles and in the field he caught the fly ball that won the game.
The coa
ch, of course, was stunned. He had never seen Luke play so well, and after the game he pulled him aside.
“That was a tremendous performance,” he told the child. “But you've never played like that before. What was the difference today?”
Luke smiled then and the coach could see his child like brown eyes welling up with happy tears.
“Well, Coach, a long time ago my dad died in a car wreck. My mother was very sick. She was blind and she couldn't walk very well. Last week … she died.” Luke swallowed back the tears and then continued. “Today … today was the first time both my parents got to see me play.”
Letting Go
Kari Clausen was a woman who clung to the people she loved. Growing up, she and her sister were insepara ble, maintaining a bond that was even stronger as they be came adults. It was the same way with her husband, close friends, and her aging parents.
And it was especially so when it came to her children.
Kari was over-protective and fearful every day for their safety. It was something she despised about herself but it re mained all the same. There was no added peace from her faith in God or the fact that Cole, five, and Anna, three, had never suffered more than a skinned knee.
“Help me have a looser hold on them, God,” she would pray. But inevitably she took to worrying again. There were nights that summer when she couldn't sleep because of fears that one or both of her children would get hurt.
Or worse.
And so when tragedy did come, Kari was expecting it. But nothing in her wildest imagination could have pre pared her for that June morning when everything about her life changed in a single instant.
That morning Kari and her husband, Mel, were packing their belongings for a move from West Hills, California, to nearby Thousand Oaks. For days Cole and Anna had passed the afternoons playing outside while their parents filled cardboard boxes and loaded them onto their trailer.
By afternoon they were nearly done and Mel was in the back bedroom with a friend who was helping them pack.
“Mommy, can you tie my shoes?” Cole ran down the hallway holding a pair of sneakers. “Me and Anna are gonna play out back, okay?”