Scrambling from the kitchen to the living room, I grabbed up my ringing cell phone. Glancing down quickly at the display without my glasses on, it looked like my wife was calling. Since moving to Malaysia, I didn’t get many calls, and when I did, it was usually my wife.
With a smile, I said, “Hello!” No answer. “Hello, Hello!! Hello???” Still no answer, but in the background I could hear a weird metal hollow sound, like metal scraping against metal or metal on pavement. My first thought was that my wife had been in a car accident and was lying crumpled and bleeding underneath the car wreckage trying to talk to me.
Looking down at the phone display, I held it close to my eyes and saw it wasn’t my wife’s name but five numbers and symbols the same length as my wife’s name. I hung up for a few minutes, but the feeling of her being in an accident was so compelling, I went to prayer! “Father, I don’t know what’s going on, but please protect my wife! If she’s been in a car wreck, get help to her quickly!! In Jesus name! Amen!” Then I dialed her number, and she picked up. She was out of breath and said, “You wouldn’t believe what just happened; you almost lost your wife!”
Here in Penang, driving is always a high-risk proposition. A good percentage of drivers ignore traffic lights, run stop signs, pass on double lines, don’t use their turn signals, don’t stop for pedestrians, speed excessively, and then there are the motorbike riders who are constantly breaking all the rules swerving in and out of traffic at high rates of speed. So when she said she was in a near accident, she had my attention!
Here is the story she recounted to me: “I was cautiously passing through the middle of an intersection–cautiously because this particular intersection had neither a traffic light nor stop signs–when out of nowhere I was shocked to see a large white sedan at my driver’s side car door! “Where on earth did he come from?” I thought. It all happened in seconds. As I looked down through my side window, I absolutely could not see any distance at all between his front bumper and my door. I was still moving, and he was directly perpendicular to my door, ready to plow right on through it!
Given the rate of speed he was going and with just inches between my body and his bumper, my first thought was, “I’m dead” and if not dead, then maimed for life; at the very minimum, I knew my car would be totaled. There was no human way possible based on the position of the white car at that moment that there was even time for him to clear my back door, let alone the rest of the back of the car. But when there was no human way, there was a God way! God decided to intervene in that intersection on Jalan Brown on that particular day in Penang, Malaysia, by either stopping time or stopping the sedan or stopping something else that needed to be stopped in order to avoid a horrible accident.
What I know is that I found myself on the other side of the intersection . . . Taking a quick inventory–yes, I was still all in one piece! And I knew that I knew that I knew that either God Himself or an angel sent from God had just intervened on my behalf. I was humbled.
The white sedan sped away; not one piece of metal came in contact with another, but somehow the seriousness of what had just happened brought all the cars in the intersection to a screeching halt–a rare thing in Penang! I looked around, and for a few seconds there was absolutely no movement–just silence–a silence that might have been more than just a reaction to a near-miss accident . . . perhaps a silence denoting a Presence that was unmistakably sensed by every eyewitness there that day.”
Her story brought back memories of God suddenly stopping a car for me many years ago. One cold winter in Saskatchewan I was driving a large white van on an icy city road. Snow was everywhere, and I was trying to avoid the shiny ice patches on the pavement by only going about 30 mph. Approaching an intersection, I saw a little girl step out into the street to cross the road. A black car was sitting as he waited on her to pass in front of him, and I was about fifty feet behind the black car.
I stepped on my brakes to slow and nothing happened! I turned my wheel to keep from hitting the black car that the little girl was now directly in front of. I turned to the right, to left, still on my bakes, nothing—I kept sliding forward. I was about to smash into the back end of the black car which would have driven it right into the little girl when I cried out, “Lord Jesus, stop me!!!!”
I stopped. About two feet from the black car’s rear bumper. It was a sudden stop, but I didn’t lunge forward! God had just stopped me. I was so shaken, I got out of the van, slipped on the ice and fell flat. The van was sitting on one large sheet of ice. The black car had moved on, and the little girl stepped up on to the sidewalk while I lay on the ice marveling at what God had just done.
When my wife said that it was God who stopped the big white sedan, I believed her! I got the weird phone call clearly hearing the metal noises, and the thought came to me to pray for protection about my wife being in a traffic accident at the exact moment when she was going through the ordeal.
It makes me wonder—did God call my cell phone?
“The Lord Himself goes before you and will be with you …” Deuteronomy 31:8
Copyright (c) 2011 by William D. (Nick) Nichols
CLUNK!! Sitting with the back half my car on the road and the front half of my car hanging in the air over a large three-foot deep utility ditch—I felt stupid! It was dark at 2 AM in the morning, and I hadn’t seen the newly cut ditch as I turned into our townhouse complex. I was really tired and I mumbled half to myself and half to the Lord, “I can’t believe I just did that!”
