by Linda Van Fleet
A friend shares the following story about her nephew, Billy.
Young Billy loved to go to work with his Dad. Although he was only five years old, he had his own hammer and wanted to “help” his dad build their new house. One day his dad cautioned him “Don’t go up those stairs, Billy. It is dangerous.” Billy said “Yes sir,” and played quietly near the stairs, glancing up occasionally at the unfinished floor above where the workmen were putting down flooring. Then, when no one was watching him, he tiptoed cautiously to the forbidden stair case and crawled upward on his hands and knees, taking his hammer with him. Just as he reached the top his mom came into the unfinished house to take Billy back home. Upon seeing him at the top of the stair case she screamed, “Billy!” Startled, Billy lost his footing and fell headlong through the floor joists to the first floor below, landing on his head.
In the emergency room, Billy kept talking about the Big Man who caught him. Thinking he was delirious no one paid much attention to what he was saying. But a few weeks later when he was out of the hospital and doing fine, he looked up at his mom and said, “Mom, who was that big man who caught me when I fell?”
“Billy, no one caught you. You fell right down to the floor. It is a miracle you are not dead.”
“The big man caught me, Mom.” Billy insisted. “He let me down easy.”
Billy is a now young man in his twenties and he still believes a “big man caught him” when he fell from the second floor that day.
Another such story comes from a forty-seven year old Duane Edwards from Houston,Texas. He relates that when he was about ten years old he would catch young pigeons in their nest before they could fly and take them home and finish raising them, so they could be part of his flock. He took lots of chances to reach the nest but on this particular day he went beyond reasonable safety. He was on the roof of an abandoned two-story house, trying to scoot across the roof lying down. As he reached around the ridge of a dormer, he suddenly realized his body was out too far. Too late to correct the situation, he slipped off the roof and started falling to the ground. He says, “I vividly recall my terror as I started my fall to the ground when an unseen force gently pushed my body back onto the roof. I was in wonder as to what just happened.”
Duane said, “I came off the roof and went straight home to tell my mother what had just happened. She confidently shared with me that an angel had rescued me. Because of this experience, I was forever awakened to the reality of angels and have gone on to have other experiences.”