Angel Story

It was an old blue Toyota that once belonged to his father. The two men loved that rusty piece of antique machinery. Lee paid so much money to repair it and turn it into a rock climber that he later told me, “I could have had a brand-new Corolla with its very own key fob for all I’ve spent on these wheels.” True. I felt kind of guilty there since it was my idea that he buy back the Landcruiser which Rob had driven for so many years before he’d sold it. And then I got over it. Even with its new Chevrolet engine and expanded, wide wheelbase, that faded blue truck with its original Toyota body still didn’t have air conditioning or enough seat belts or power anything. Lee dubbed the hybrid version they’d come up with “The Toy-let.” It was a man’s truck inside and out and that’s the reason they loved it. It’s also the reason I seldom rode in it.

“I want you to tell me about that afternoon in the mountains,” I told Lee today as we caught up by phone. “The day the steering gave out on the Landcruiser.”

Instantly, Lee was back behind the wheel of his first vehicle, careening out of control at sixty miles an hour down the last mountain grade before he hit desert flatlands--literally. With him rode two of his best friends, one in the passenger seat in the front, the other in the boxy rear without a safety belt.

“I told them to brace themselves,” he said, remembering the terrifying experience. “A pin came out of the steering column on the last steep grade coming down off the Mogollon Rim. I tried to use the brakes, but I had no control over the wheels.” The college age boys hung on in terror, unable to do anything as the Toyota gained speed, its wheels unresponsive to Lee’s frantic efforts to straighten out. With no one able to steer it, the truck and its passengers were headed for a deep ravine in the middle of nowhere in the Arizona heat.

“A curb suddenly appeared right before we went off the road,” Lee remembered, telling his story as if it happened yesterday. “In the middle of the desert, our right front wheel clipped a solitary curb, careened off it, and the impact sent us across two lanes to the other side of the divided highway.”

“You coasted to a stop on the side of the road then?” I asked.

“Yep. For a minute, we just sat there, trying to believe what had happened. That’s when another truck pulled in behind us. There hadn’t been anyone around for miles, we crash into a curb and come to a stop on the side of the highway, and suddenly there’s this old pickup rolling to a stop a few yards back of us. It was loaded up with a bunch of junk covered by a big tarp and the guy told me he and his family were moving to California, taking all the back roads on their way. This was a weird back road to drive in a truck like that. It looked like it was straight out of The Grapes of Wrath. The driver told me he’d run out of gas.”

He ran out of gas at exactly the same place where Lee’s truck had gone rogue.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“We siphoned some gas from my tank and put it in his truck.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought you had an extra can with you. But if you had to siphon it, what did you use to get it out?”

“He had a piece of garden hose in that pile of junk in the pickup bed. And he dug around in there for a while, found a screw, crawled up under the Landcruiser and used it to tighten down the steering mechanism. He said it’d hold until I got home and was sure I could drive it. Dad arrived after the guy left and followed us home, but the man was right. I never broke down and we made it back.”

That’s when I asked the hard question. Right after I reviewed the crazy story he’d just told me.

The boys had spent a weekend camping in the mountains and trying out the rock-climbing features of Lee’s truck. They were headed home and nearly made it to the flatlands off the curvy mountain grade when a pin fell out of the steering system, making it impossible for Lee to straighten out the wheels and avoid driving off into a ravine at sixty miles per hour. Only two of the three passengers had seatbelts. There was tragedy in the making in the desert that afternoon when a piece of curbing suddenly appeared at exactly the right place to re-direct an out-of-control Landcruiser away from the ravine and back onto the straightaway so Lee’s braking could stop his vehicle. Then a stranger rolls in right behind them in his Grapes of Wrath truck with the know-how to make a screw work in place of a pin in an antique Toyota, whips out a length of hose and siphons gasoline from the Landcruiser into his own vehicle, and goes on his merry way. To California. In the middle of a hot September day in Arizona’s desert.

I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “So . . . did you think the guy in the Grapes of Wrath truck might have been an angel?”

“That’s exactly what we thought,” he answered. “As soon as the adrenalin calmed and we could talk about it, we were all convinced the guy was an angel.”

It still makes me break out in a cold sweat when I think how very differently that day could have turned out. It was an impossible situation, and they knew it. They were bracing for the worst, holding on for dear life with no options available to stop the inevitable.

But then a curb appeared.

Followed by a beat-up truck and a driver with an unlikely story.

And a screw in place of a pin that held the steering together all the way back from the desert to the city.

I mean, it could have been a coincidence. All those miraculous things that came together at exactly the right moment and saved the lives of three young men. It could have been. Except later we drove back to the scene of the crime, rode up and down that highway for miles, and we never found that cement curb—which had no reason to be there in the first place since there wasn’t another building in sight for fifty miles in any direction.

I don’t know about you, but in a world where things are desperately trying to go to hell in a hand basket, it gives me more hope than I can describe to know we have armies of angels on our side all the time.

Even before we ask, even if there’s no time to ask for help, God’s messengers are watching, ready to intervene. “What role, then, do the angels have? The angels are spirit-messengers sent by God to serve those who are going to be saved. . . I make my angels swift winds, and my ministers fiery flames.” *

And, sometimes, they even drive old pickup trucks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Hebrews 1:14 and 1:7, Amplified Bible

With thanks to SoulRider.222 for permission to use this photo of the Toy-let's twin, but with a lot less rust. The original photo can be viewed by following this link: Toyota Land Cruiser | May 2011. While riding. Nikon Coolpix … | Flickr