Angel of Beirut

Were I to have had any doubt about God protecting me, one incident in the Middle East would have dispelled it. I had traveled on university business from Jordan to Lebanon (a trip that put me on the “search her on every leg of every trip,” i.e. “randomly selected for search” list at airports worldwide for a while).

One morning in Beirut I started down a ghetto-looking street, devoid of vegetation or people, wondering if I had somehow misunderstood the instructions that the hotel clerk had given me in French. (French and Arabic are the two lingua francas in Lebanon. Of these, I chose to speak French. My mastery of French was greater than my capacity to communicate in Arabic, and I certainly looked more European than Arab although when I donned hijab — a headscarf — I could surprisingly pass for a Middle Easterner in looks.)

The stone buildings on the Beirut street stood stoically silent as if on guard, comrades of mixed color and size, humbly displaying the wounds of past wars for any accidental passerby. Some had chipped corners and broken stairs. Most were bullet-ridden.

As I walked down the street, a man suddenly appeared. Where had he come from? He looked directly at me and called out to me.

“You are not from Beirut, are you?” he asked in excellent English although his countenance was definitely Arab. He then commented, “You look Western.”

“I am a Westerner,” I answered cautiously, careful not to mention my American heritage. In the Middle East, I was always honest but never candid. If, in any given situation, I could pass for European or, as more often happened, a Russian, I did so. It was safer, given the war in Iraq and highly emotional reactions to Americans in the Middle East in general.

In response to my admission, the man replied, “In that case, you don’t want to be walking down this street. It would not be safe for you. Where are you trying to go?”

I crossed the street to where he was standing so that we did not have to continue to shout. He waited patiently, without moving. Coming up to him, I explained that I was looking for an ATM. He directed me to another street. I thanked him and walked away.

I thought he had remained at the spot where we had spoken, but as I was passing through the intersection only seconds later, I turned and saw that the spot was empty. How fortunate, I thought at the time, that he was in the right place at the right time to protect me. Later, I wondered how he could have disappeared so quickly?

But who was he? As Ashley Siferd wrote in her guest blog on this site last week, there is someone watching out for me. Wish I were worthy of it! Well, I may not deserve it, but I do love it!!

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Adapted excerpt from my book, Blest Atheist. Other excerpts from Blest Atheist can be found on my other blog, Mahlou Musings, where I have double-posted this post, as well, for convenience of readers of that blog, who tend to differ from readers here.

For more angel stories on this blog, click here. For more angel stories on the Mahlou Musings blog, click here and here.

Beth Niquette maintains a blog of angel stories that you might like to read, and I would point out that Sr. Lorraine is looking for angel stories for a book should you have any to share.

In conclusion, may you always be watched over by angels!

Blest Guest Wednesday #3: There Is Someone Looking Out for Me (Ashley Siferd)

Since early August, it has been difficult for me to post regularly although I have somehow managed not to let more than a few days go by between posts. Considering that my crazy travel schedule is definitely going to continue for a few more months, I have been able to bring a little sanity to the blogging part of my life by asking for help. Some wonderful fellow bloggers have been willing to write guest posts for me on Wednesdays, hence the name "Blest Guest Wednesday." As today's "Blest Guest," I asked Ashley Siferd, who has been with me on this blog from nearly its very beginning and who writes a blog called If Necessary, Use Words. I think you will find her life, her blog, and her post here interesting. Here goes:

There Is Someone Looking Out For Me

While I don’t recall ever having a face-to-face encounter with an angel, I do believe that they are present in my life. Of course I think that those human beings who carry out certain kind acts that occur on a daily basis (like holding open a door for someone with full hands or picking up a person’s books that fell) are angels, but in this context, I mean the spiritual, ethereal beings who serve God.

I have never doubted the existence of God. Sometimes I have found myself thinking about the question, “Well, what if there wasn’t a God?” but I have never ever thought of an answer. I know that He in fact is there because on numerous occasions, I have felt His presence or that of someone who was helping me, like an angel.

I am not a terrible driver. I will admit that I have a certain degree of road rage, yes. However, I am careful. I’m both a defensive and offensive driver. But being both doesn’t mean that I will avoid every potential hazard or dangerous situation. Once while turning left onto the two-lane highway, the lady in the left lane either completely forgot that I was there or just didn’t care. She started to drift over into my lane while we were turning, and there was nowhere for me to go. I had just enough shoulder to move over, but it wouldn’t have helped because she just kept coming!

Her car should have hit me. Miraculously though, it did not. Puzzling to me also was that I was not enraged with her. I felt a calm presence in my car. I was safe and not angry. I couldn’t explain it. That is when I first realized that Someone up there is watching out for me.

I’ve recently had a few “almost catastrophes” in the car. Most of them have been not so nice folk who have nearly t-boned me while I have been going through a certain intersection. If you are driving up the hill next to my dorm, you do not have a stop sign but everyone else does. I always slow down so that I don’t get smeared, but apparently some people just don’t like to obey the law. Amazingly (and miraculously!) enough, my car and most importantly my life has been spared. Protected.

The other night I was driving home on the interstate. I had been told that bad weather was coming, but when I left campus, it was nice out…what bad weather were you talking about? I had just merged onto the interstate when it began to rain. I don’t enjoy driving on the interstate at night. I hate driving on the interstate when it is raining. What do you know? It starts raining very hard while I was driving home at night. The perfect storm, I guess, right? Well I had never had that unfortunate combination before. All I could do was pray and sing along with my mixed CDs. Even though it took me a lot longer than normal, I made it home safely. I found out later that I had been driving through a storm that had prompted several tornado warnings in the area!

Now every time I get in the car, even if it is just to go down the road two miles, I ask my guardian angel and my extra driving angels to watch out for me and to be in the car with me. I pray for a safe journey for me and the other drivers around me.

I’m sure that there have been numerous occasions when my angels have hit the palms of their hands on their heads in bewilderment, thinking, OMG what are we going to do with this girl? What was she thinking? I know I’m oblivious to some things that go on around me, but they certainly are not. I’m thankful for their constant vigilance, but I’m even more thankful that God has granted His angels charge over me. Lord knows I need them!

Thankful Thursday #1: A Grateful Heart in Kiev

Since it has been a brutal day for me, having spent more than three hours on foot (taking the metro and marshrutny taxi -- the express mini-bus -- does not eliminate a lot of walking in Kiev), more time in chairs meeting with people, followed by facility tours (more walking beyond the three hours), very little down time, and limited Internet minutes, I have decided to join the Thankful Thursday crowd this week because I am thankful for so much these days. More information about two-year-old Thankful Thursday meme can be found at the website of Grace Alone. So, here is what I am thankful for today.

• In keeping with yesterday’s post, I would have to say that I am thankful again and again for all the times that God takes care of me. I have come to rely on that, whether at home or traveling the world. After all, the entire world is home to God.

• On a pragmatic level, I am grateful for the purse-size Korean hand-fan that I purchased on a whim in Korea; without air conditioning here in Kiev and with the temperatures soaring to unseasonably high levels, I am putting that little fan to good use.

• I am grateful for people who let me know when I have made their lives easier; for example, the young professor who was assigned to be my escort when I visited the university told me she did not sleep at all the night before because she was anxious about our meeting, but once she had met me, she really enjoyed the time we spent together and was quite relieved that things turned out differently from what she had worried about; a hug took away any remaining reservations.

• Of course, in recent days, I am thankful for the health of Shane and Nikolina (and even Nathaniel and Doah, who have had their small issues); we could have lost them both, but we were reprieved (once again, spoiled).

• This week I joined Face Book (under my real name) and found many old friends there, including a number of high school classmates; I also have found new friends; for every single person, I am grateful.

• We got a little bit closer to finding Ksenya this week, and I am very grateful for that.

• I had lost contact with my friend from Austria, and up she popped on my email the morning I was leaving for Ukraine and Germany; I would have been shouting distance from her and not have seen her; instead, after mass on Sunday, we are going to meet in Austria, in the Alps, just across the German border for lunch; I have not seen her for nearly ten years!

• Recently, one of my employees at a branch site became very ill (cancer) and used up all his sick leave, with no end in site; I donated two days of leave to him and asked all 400 of my employees, if they could, to follow suit with one hour or however much they could afford; the payroll clerk tells me that we got many donations (some went straight into the system without going through her so I only know about those anecdotally and some I don’t know about at all); I am very proud of my employees and very thankful for their generosity.

• In the same vein, I am pleased and grateful that nearly all the managers I supervise understand the difference between doing things right and doing the right thing and consistently choose the latter; it makes the working atmosphere so much better.

• I am also grateful that I no longer have any non-believers among the managers in my division; that was not anything I caused or planned; rather, I assume that God is spoiling me again.

• I am grateful that God intervenes in my work place, creating miracles and positioning people to help one another.

• And finally, coming back to where I started this post, I am grateful to God for being in all the strange and familiar places to which I travel so that I am never alone, never without help, and never without someone to talk to.

For what are you thankful this wonderful Thursday?

God Took Care of Me Again!

Just a quick post today because I am not even sure which day “today” is. I need to hop into bed for about four hours of sleep before getting up in the Ukraine to a new day, a day full of meetings and work. It is still Wednesday afternoon in the USA, if my telephone clock is correct. So, I will label this a Wednesday post, make it short, share one of God’s small mercies for which I am always (well, at least usually, thankful), and go to bed.

I came into Kiev this evening (actually, early this morning) with two colleagues. Neither was from the Ukraine and therefore not aware of how to handle the taxi situation from the airport – how to tell which ones were safe, how to gauge the price, etc. Fortunately, we did not have to know anything. The young man sitting beside me and I got into an interesting conversation. He told me about how he got into working in Germany albeit being a Ukrainian. Then he asked me how it was that my fate brought me to the USA. For a minute, I thought I had misunderstood something in Russian, then I realized that he had just paid me a huge linguistic compliment. I explained that I had grown up in Maine. He still did not understand and asked how my parents had gotten to Maine, at which point I told him I had only a Russian tongue and not a drop of Russian blood. He laughed at his erroneous assumption that I was a Russian emigrant to the USA, and then, realizing that I was a foreigner in a strange land (not entirely strange, but it has been 15 years since I was last in Kiev), he offered to share with the three of us his company’s driver. What an easy way to get to the hotel!

I gave him my email address and asked him to keep in touch. He may. It seems like quite a repeat of my meeting with Eddie Pareiras of Campinas, Brazil. Once again, without my even asking, God took care of me. How otherwise would one explain the perfect seatmate on the plane? Luck? Okay, I suppose one could. But such luck twice, in two different hemispheres? I think luck may be, as someone once said, those times when God chooses to be anonymous!

Yippee! I’m off to bed, wishing you all a blessed day, evening, night…whatever it is where you are!

Monday Morning Meditation #7: God's Protection

As I post this, I have an odd feeling. It is not Monday morning here in Seoul, South Korea. Monday morning has come and gone, and now Tuesday is pretty much here. Crossing the International Date Line is a real trip, in both senses of that word. So, I had to decide whether to post on Monday morning Korean time or Monday morning USA time. I decided to use the time that blog readers have likely become used to: PDT.

This week, I made it through the final couple of verses of Genesis and moved on to the very beginning of Exodus. At this rate, I will be well past the age of 100 before I finish reading the whole Bible. Actually, I belong to a Bible Study group that is moving through the Bible much faster: it will only take us ten years to finish. Today I got stopped very early in Exodus: Chapter 2, to be specific. I was captivated by the story of Moses -- not of the man, but of the baby.

Reading: Exodus 2:1-10.

Meditation: What struck me about the little baby in the bulrushes was just how vulnerable he was and how perfectly God arranged everything for his protection and also for his mother's psychological well-being. Anything could have happened to baby Moses, and by the law of the Pharaoh, he should have been killed. However, God led Pharaoh's daughter to have compassion on him and then guided the handmaiden to Moses's own mother for breastfeeding him. The relief his mother must have felt in all of this is something with which any mother can empathize.

Moses and his mother owed a great debt of gratitude to God for His protection. True, it turned out later that God had an immense plan for using Moses to deliver His people, the Hebrews, from slavery. Nonetheless, one must say "thank you" with great awe when God provides this kind of protection. I know because my family and I have been protected by God upon occasion after occasion. I will provide just a few examples, but they represent only a small fraction of the times that God has come to our rescue.

In addition to the string of muggings where I did not get hurt and lost very little (not that I have much to lose), God clearly has taken care of me in my travels. One interesting situation comes immediately to mind: a trip to Campinas, Brazil. I sat in seat B on the plane, and the guy in seat A, Eddie, was surprisingly from Campinas. We got to know each other, and, giving me his home phone number, he invited me to visit if I could find time in my schedule while there. At the baggage claim in Sao Paolo, we shook hands and parted. I trotted out to the curb to find the US Embassy driver who was supposed to take me to Campinas. He was not there. I called the embassy, but it being the weekend, no one had any idea as to who should have been there. Since neither the staff duty officer nor I had the home phone number for my contact at the embassy for the project I was to do in Campinas, I asked some of the locals how to get to Campinas and took the bus that they told me about. Arriving in Campinas, I called Eddie. What else? I had no idea what hotel I was supposed to be at. Eddie rescued me from the bus station, took me home where his wife gave me a wonderful dinner and his young daughter drew me a wonderful picture that I still have, and then looked up in the local phone book the telephone number of the institution where I was to be working. When we called the institution, there was an emergency phone number given on a recording, and from that we were able to contact the director, who did know what hotel I was supposed to be at and efficiently arranged everything for the night and for my arrival at the institution in the morning.

Another time, Lizzie, who was eleven at the time, and I were walking home from the metro station in a suburb of Arlington, Virginia one Saturday morning, when we glimpsed three men, probably in their early twenties, walking behind us, clearly stoned, and clearly targeting us. As they walked, they chanted, "You're going to die." They came closer and closer. Except for them, we were alone on the street and, being new in town, knew no one. As they came within touching distance, I turned into the nearest house, figuring anyone would help us in this case. As it turned out, no one was home, and the three men were lounging against a tree outside the yard, observing us.

"Oh, Lizzie, he told us he would be in the basement; we need the other door," I said just loudly enough to be heard by the young men, and we calmly walked around to the back of the house. Once out of sight, I whispered urgently to Lizzie, "Run!" And we ran all the way home through the back alleys.

The young men did not follow because they did not see us. More important, Lizzie did not panic for one minute. She just kept talking to me about mundane things as if she were not hearing the voices behind us, which I also ignored. Perhaps this was a self-rescue by a brilliant, calm, and collected mother and daughter, but I don't think so. I think Lizzie's calmness came partly from me, partly from herself, and partly from a sense of security that only God could have given her. Had she panicked, as a typical 11-year-old would have/should have, we would probably not be alive today.

Another planting of a calm and collected sense of security occurred with 7-year-old Shane, who was riding a public bus to and from his private school in what was usually in those days (25 years ago) a very safe area. One day, school got out late, and Shane missed his regular bus. As he waited for the next one, he was the only person sitting at the bus stop. A car with two men pulled up, and one of them ordered cute blue-eyed, blond Shane to get into his car.

"No, no. I was told to wait here," he said. "My parents are in the restaurant." (There was a Red Lobster restaurant behind the bus stop.)

One of the men got out of the car and headed for Shane. Shane headed for the restaurant, and seeing a couple walking out of the restaurant toward the parking lot, he hollered and waved, "Mom, Dad, I am over here!"

The man leaped into the car, and the car sped away. Shane then ran into the restaurant and asked one of the waitresses to call me. When I arrived, he was eating a free lobster dinner, surrounded by the waitress staff, who thought he was "darling" and "so cool-headed!"

Again, I could say that Shane was a very intelligent and collected child. He was. But where did that couple in the parking lot come from at just the right time? And how did a 7-year-old, even one in the fifth grade, as Shane was, feel secure enough not to panic? (Oh, and for those who would ask, I made alternative arrangements to the public bus after that for Shane even though all the other children in his class rode the bus.)

And then there was Doah, my mentally challenged youngest, who wanted to go in to work with one Saturday when I had to pull some overtime. I guess it took me too long to get ready because he managed to unlock the door, wander outside, and head down the street, the "street" being a four-lane major highway. When I found him missing, I panicked. I ran down the highway, calling him, but he was nowhere in sight. After only a few minutes, thank God (literally), someone emerged from a side street, asking if I were looking for a little blond boy. Was I?! He had been strolling right in the middle of the highway when some people leaving church had seen him and scooped him up, but they then had no way of returning him. The conversation, which was truly the best that Doah, given his level of intelligence, could manage, went like this:

Q: What's your name? A: Doah.
Q: What's your mother's name? A: Mommy.
Q: What's your father's name? A: Daddy.
Q: Where do you live? A: Home.

They were as glad to see me as I was to see them. I still shake when I think about how close I came to losing Doah, and how seemingly miraculously these people appeared, both to prevent him from being struck by a car and then again to tell me they had him.

I could give two dozen more examples. However, I will stop here with one short, final comment -- not from me but from the interim priest I wrote about yesterday, who once walked me to the door of the parish office where I was the last to depart at the conclusion of an evening meeting. He just stood in the doorway, and so I looked at him quizzically. "I will watch you until you get to your car," he said protectively.

"I hope you have extraordinary distance vision," I replied, "because I walked!"

"Then, please be very careful," he responded.

"I'm not worried," I told him. "I feel protected."

He looked at me piercingly and said in an odd, quiet voice, "I think you are."

In my mind, there is no "think" about it. I know I am. I don't know why God protects me and my family so carefully, and I don't ask. I am simply grateful that God does. I suppose these experiences, among many others, are what has led to my unflappable trust in God.

And that is far as I can go with you on this Monday morning. I must retire to prayer to ask God to protect everyone the way He has protected me (and many others of my acquaintance), to express my regret for taking chances that make Him have to protect me and for any times I have forgotten to say thank you (especially those times when I was still an atheist and attributed every good thing to Serendipity, not aware that the other name for Serendipity is God), to give thanks for His willingness to take care of me whether or not I have "earned" His protection, and to offer praise for the remarkable ways in which He is able to intervene and prevent bad things from happening in the first place as well as all the times that He turns bad into good.

After that, I will spend some time in contemplation with this wonderful God whom I know I can trust with absolutely anything and everything, including my life -- and have.

I will now leave you to your prayer and contemplation.

If you pick this up as a weekly devotional activity, please share with me and others your own thoughts about the message of Exodus 2:1-10 or any other scripture that you choose for meditation. Feel free to export the image of the mission church; maybe some time in the near future my Internet-inept self will be able to figure out how to use the Mr. Linky buttons. In the interim, you are welcome to use the image and share the meme of Monday Morning Meditation for starting out the work week closer to God.

Have a good day and a blessed week, filled with the knowledge that God is willing to protect us and with gratitude to God for that (and for much more)!
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PS. I did not realize how long this was until after I posted it! I guess that is because I have needed A LOT of protection from God. Thank you for your reading patience.