Angelic Drives and Faithbuilding Experiences

In which Our Heroine is saved, the first Time

I have previously discussed how there have been difficulties in finding a place to hang my faith at times during this latest episode of my life, especially nearer the beginning.  I had some questions and had to find ways to answer them.  You’ll remember my fourth blog post about finding out I would live.  Did I mention to you that there were two weeks of not knowing how to pray for the answer to my “Will I live?” question before I received an answer?  Somehow, I found that all that faith that was good enough for a normal day wasn’t quite good enough for the big stuff.  Two weeks is a short wrestle before God, but a sincerely difficult one.  However, I am grateful that I didn’t have to start from a zero point of faith—that would have been very difficult indeed.  And it would seem very ungrateful of me (to my Heavenly Father) if I didn’t offer to you, my readers, a few of the ways that He prepared me for the end of my world.

How did he do this?  Over the past year I have had at least two experiences with angelic ministrations.  Angels among us?  Yes.  I have not mentioned them before because it is difficult to toss something so sacred and personal out onto the loud-mouth internet.  But after watching Conference yesterday, I realized that the general authorities talk about sacred stuff all the time to the world, and leave it up to the Holy Ghost to do the rest.  So, I offer to you my first tale of angelic ministration. 

It was a year ago, a winter day.  I was driving to Target and hit a patch of very black ice—invisible enough that later I actually questioned all of this.  Some of you Alaskans will know the roundabout at Minnesota and C-Street.  There will be many others of you that have driven on northern icy roads, and will know that when you hit ice and need to turn your car, the darned thing will just keep sliding in a straight trajectory toward destruction.  Turning your wheel, even in moderate amounts, will get you nowhere.  Either that, or to the wrong place quick.  There I was, going too fast and not able to get my car into that nice curve that roundabouts require.  I was quite sure I was going to crash our recently purchased car—a car that represented long hours of work and savings for our family. 

Upon this last thought, the terror hit me.  We could not suffer the loss of this car! (Well, we’ll see about that certitude in a later angel blog post.) Anyway, terrified, I opened my mouth and uttered “Heavenly Father, please help me!”  At that exact moment, my car began to turn.  It did not slow, but was on that perfect curvature. At this point my mind seemed fractured between terror and astonishment.  I experienced a second kind of fracturing here as well: I wondered just what was going on with my car, and the answer came through the Holy Ghost.  It was if I had another set of eyes (spiritual eyes) looking down on my situation from above and then again looking to the left out of my window.  It was like I was seeing three things at once (Picasso style): my current physical view along with the double spiritual vision.  I saw my red Subaru legacy had a tall broad-shouldered man just there on the left, pushing the car to make the turn for me.  I don’t remember seeing details exactly, but I had the impression he looked like one of my brothers, Bryce, and that his name was Hyrum Scott, who is an ancestor of mine.  I made it to C-Street, turned to the right, and went shopping as if my day was a perfectly ordinary day.  In the next few weeks, I thought a lot about the protection that temple covenants can offer to us and how our families really are linked for eternity.