Ooops! That came out way wrong. Sorry about that, folks. Please forgive me.
What I was trying to say, in a general way and to no one in particular, is the fact that seeking God, praying, studying the Bible, and all the rest that goes along with religious/spiritual endeavors, are not foreign to me.
As I outlined in the story above, my father still turned up the night he died, apologised, conversed and screamed, even though
Code:
"seeking God, praying, studying the Bible, and all the rest that goes along with religious/spiritual endeavors",
were foreign to me, as I was an atheist at the time. Why? I don’t know.
I also remember a stand-in Baptist pastor mentioning during a sermon about two occasions when he’d had his life saved by supernatural means when he was a youth.
Apparently he grew up on a farm around Toowoomba, if my memory serves me correctly. On one occasion he was walking through long grass on his family property, with his father a short distance ahead. Suddenly he just could not move, no matter how hard he tried. In his own words, “It was like being held in a giant hand”. Eventually his father wondered why he wasn’t coming, and came back, no doubt a bit annoyed. But as he got close to Alan (the future pastor), he spotted a death adder in the grass right where Alan would have put his foot on the next step. In Alan’s words, “They move like greased lightning”.
That was one occasion. He just could not move, even though he was not aware the snake was there.
On a second occasion he was sitting with his back against an old concrete water tower, reading a book, during school lunch break. Suddenly an urgent voice cried from nowhere, “Alan, Run!!” He got up, and in his own words, “I was doing a hundred meter sprint in a couple of seconds”. As he did so, the concrete tower collapsed behind him with no warning. He’d have been killed if he’d stayed there.
But he also said, “I don’t know why my life was saved on those two occasions.” The last time I heard about him he was managing the Bible Society office in Perth, but that was some years ago now.
God exists. But why He’s so selective in His methods we won’t know until we meet Him face to face. Most of us would have been allowed to take the next step onto the snake, or would have been crushed by the tower collapsing without warning. The 18 at Siloam received no such warning when the tower collapsed. Nor did the great majority in the World Towers when the planes flew into them.
Yet God saved the life of one relatively unknown future Baptist pastor by supernatural means on two occasions, not just one.
