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an elementary school teacher, once told
me the following story:
    Driving home one day, I approached a railroad crossing. There
was no barrier, no flashing lights. As my car straddled the rails, it
stalled. Then I heard a train coming. When I saw it, I was so terrified that my mind went blank: I could not remember how to restart the car.
Just then a man walked up to me and said simply, “Ma’am,
the train is coming.” I said, “I know. Thank you.” Instantly I knew
how to start the car.
I got off the tracks just in time and pulled to the side of the
road. Then I looked around to thank the man, but he was nowhere to be seen.
    James, a volunteer with the Friends Ambulance Unit in China in
1945, had a similar experience.
    I was assigned to a medical team in Tengchung, near the Burma
border, and was asked to go to Kunming, about five hundred
miles east, to get medical supplies and equipment. After negotiating a ride for the first two hundred miles (to the city of Bao
Shan) with the Chinese Army, I started off with Yang Yung Lo, a
Chinese volunteer who could not speak English.
On our return trip we were dropped off at Bao Shan, where
we hoped a U.S. Army convoy would pick us up and take us back
to Tengchung. After two days of waiting, we were informed that
a convoy was on its way, but that we would have to meet it on
the other side of the river where we were waiting.
Yang Yung Lo and I were desperate. The river was only
about fifty feet wide, but we had half a ton of medical supplies
with us, and the bridge, which had many boards missing, was
slippery and unsafe for trucks.
Just then a Chinese man (or so he seemed) appeared. He was
dressed in white. He asked us who we were and what we were
doing. I told him we were with the Red Cross and were trying to
transport medical supplies across the bridge. He understood immediately and said, “I will help you.” I don’t remember the details, but we made many trips across the bridge, and all went very
smoothly. Afterward I went to thank our helper. He had disappeared.
It wasn’t until later, when we were safely on our way with
the convoy, that I realized how our spirits had been lifted the
moment the stranger appeared on the scene, and that we had
understood each other without difficulty, despite the language
barrier. I have thought of the experience often since. I do not
understand it, but I am certain that God’s hand was in it.
    Johann Christoph Blumhardt, a nineteenth-century pastor well
known in his native Germany, experienced the intervention of
angels on numerous occasions. Once a small child in his parish was
running down a village street when an ox-drawn farm wagon,
loaded with manure, rumbled toward him. Passersby shouted at the
driver, but it was too late. The boy was knocked down and a heavy
wheel ran right over his chest. Seconds later, to the amazement of
onlookers, the boy was on his feet again, unhurt. Asked if he was
all right, the boy looked at them in surprise. “Yes. Didn’t you see
the man lift the wheel?”
    Another time, at a train station, Blumhardt was so intent on the
newspaper he was reading that he walked right off the end of the
platform. Instead of falling, though, he felt himself supported as if
by invisible arms and gently set on the ground. He did not speak
about this to anyone but his immediate family; he accepted it
quietly, like a child, and thanked God for protecting him. To the
modern mind, the incident seems uncanny. To the believer, it
simply fulfills the well-known promise in Psalm 91: “He will give his
angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands
they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
    I sometimes wonder
how many more prayers would be answered
if we prayed more earnestly and with greater reverence for the
mysteries of the unseen angel world. I say “angel world” in the
sense that