The Divine Dance

     During my time home from my studies in South Korea, I spent a month living with my grandfather. His house was so quiet and I was able to spend a good amount of time reading and swapping stories with him. I learned about WWII, family history, and his travels. He heard about my adventures in Africa and Asia, and he ate my Korean cooking.

     On my last walk around the hill where my grandfather lived, I saw a lady walking a large golden retriever with a shaggy winter coat. 

     Now it’s important to note that the reason I took a walk this day was to clear my head. I had spent too much time reading and thinking. As a result, my head was spinning full of ideas, questions and plans for the near future. So I decided to walk it off.

God Experiences

     Many times I have had what I call “God Experiences.” I would like to share three of those that occurred during a very difficult time when our daughter fought and lost her battle with cancer.

     A few months before this happened I had attended a Prayer Renewal Workshop. The leader stressed that honesty in prayer was more important than dishonestly praying for God’s will, as we likely had been taught to pray.
     Having just learned my daughter's diagnosis, I walked down the hall silently ranting to God, complaining that I didn’t like what I had been told. It was not what I wanted for my daughter.
     Then it struck me. Rather than praying for God’s will, I instead, expressed my concern and fear, and therein found comfort.
     Years later during a guided meditation, we were asked to recall the most peaceful time in our lives.  Those few minutes in the hospital immediately came to mind….

Give, and It Shall Be...

By Pastor Randy Remington - Beaverton Foursquare Church

      When I was in Bible college, I spent nights and weekends working at UPS and also for a local moving company. During that time, I felt the Lord call me to an early prayer time each morning, even though I wasn’t getting to bed until the wee hours of the morning.
     One of the things that came out of my prayer times was that God began to speak to me about giving.
     Each month I worked enough hours to pay for my college expenses, plus I had about $40 left to buy gas for my car and to purchase those little necessities like toothpaste, etc.
     One day, I was walking across campus with the $40 in my pocket and I saw a young couple from Uganda, whose church had sent them over here to prepare for ministry. I felt like the Holy Spirit nudged me to give them my $40.
     As I walked towards them, I wondered if this was a test from God. Then I felt God say to me, “I want to demonstrate My love for them through you.”

Runaway Truck

by Judy Harris,  Carlton, Oregon
(Lived in Portland, Oregon, at this time)

      While I waited on 87th Avenue for the traffic light to turn green so I could cross Canyon Road, my heart was full of praise to God for His forgiveness and mercy. The Lord had turned my life around. Now, I was serving Him.
       When the light turned green, I drove into the intersection. A sports car drove towards me from the other side of Canyon Road and paused with its signals on, waiting for me to come through the intersection so it could turn left.
      As I drove into the middle of Canyon Road, a sudden movement caught my eyes and I glanced to my left.
      A large delivery truck was barreling towards me down the hill. But the driver’s seat was empty!

Midnight Collision

 by Jerry & Jan Werner, Bend, OR

     Jerry: In March 1997, my wife Jan and I drove our Priva van (with a large glass windshield in the front), pulling a fully loaded trailer from Sisters, Oregon, to an art stamp convention in Southern California.
     We decided to leave late at night to miss the winter storm moving in the next day.
     After driving through Klamath Falls around midnight, we came around a bend in the road. As our headlights lit the long stretch of highway in front of us, we could see a herd of deer standing all across the roadway.
     The deer stood frozen, staring at our headlights as we sped towards them at sixty-five mph. I slammed on the brakes, but I could feel our heavy trailer pushing us forward.
     Jan:  I frantically searched for an open space where our van could drive through. But deer covered both sides of the highway. With the Priva windshield that comes right down in front of us, we could clearly see the deer directly in our pathway.

Angel On My Wing

By Bill Brabham, Aloha, Oregon (as told to Helen Haidle)

     During World War II, I flew a special P38 plane on daily spy missions to Germany from an air base in England. My plane was equipped with cameras to monitor enemy troop movements on the ground.
     One cloudy day as I flew back to the base, the flight instruments on my plane quit working. I tried everything to keep the plane from stalling, but it tipped downward in a 500 mile-per-hour nosedive into the city of London.
     My heart sank. I knew I was flying over a heavily populated area. Frantically, I tried to pull up the nose of my plane to stop its steep dive.    
     When the plane finally broke through the clouds about a hundred feet above London, it suddenly switched directions and headed back up in the clouds at a 45-degree angle.
     I didn’t know why the plane had changed directions so quickly—until I looked out the window.

Touch of Spirit

by Jim Stanley, Beaverton, OR

     There it is . . . still smoking from a fiery crash! A blackened shell, the remains of a 727, lay in the center divider of two runways at the Venezuelan airport. Forty-nine people died! 

     The year was 1983. I was to report for a one-month United Nations hydrologic project in Caracas, Venezuela.    
      “I’m going, too!” my wife Arlene proclaimed upon learning of the assignment.
    Preparations began, buying new luggage and summer clothes appropriate for the tropics, plus contacting our church secretary for names of missionaries in Venezuela. Much to our delight, the secretary informed us about a husband and wife team ministering in Caracas.
      We prayed for travel protection, insight into my new job requirements, and also “hitting it off” with the missionaries.
      The morning after we arrived at the Caracas International Airport, I went to the office of the Director of Venezuela’s Natural Resources for a briefing. As the briefing drew to a close, the officer surprised me by handing me a check for the entire thirty–day assignment.
     After stopping by a local bank to cash the check, I returned to our hotel.
      “Guess what I’ve got in my briefcase?” I said as I emptied the case, full of paper Bolivars on the bed. We both laughed as we exclaimed, “How rich we are!” 
      Our richness was short lived. The next day, headlines on the local newspaper declared:    
      BOLIVAR DEVALUED . . . 58 PERCENT!