Inspiration

MORE ABOUT ANGELS

This post is very personal to me, but my hope is that someone reading this will be able to discern their own personal angel working in their lives.  As a child of God, we have the Spirit of God living within us, and we are blessed to have His cadre of angels always around us.  Sometimes, we are able to see, through the eyes of faith, our unseen angel.

In the summer of 1946 I was four years old, and I remember this incident as if it were yesterday: 

A small group of young people and children were gathered around a pond on a family farm on Wesley Chapel Road in Lawrence County, Indiana.  Most farm ponds in that area are fed by ground-water springs, making them cool-water swimming holes.  Although I don’t remember the weather that day, it must have been a typically hot Southern Indiana summer, and almost everyone in the group was in the water. 

I had not learned to swim yet, but I well remember wading and splashing in the muddy water around the edges of that pond.  And I remember that there were a few teenagers around me, some of whom lived on that farm.  One of those teens was a girl named Ruth who went by the nickname of “Sis.” 

Playing in the shallow water near the edge of the pond, my feet got stuck to the bottom in mud.  I couldn’t move, so I guess in a panic I was thrashing about in the water.  Apparently, at some point my feet came loose from the bottom and I fell forward, inhaling water into my lungs.  I remember, clearly, lying face down in the water with my eyes open, but unable to see anything.  Not breathing, it seemed I became mesmerized, in a ‘trance’ of sorts, no longer thrashing about, just very peaceful, staring down into that muddy water.

Suddenly, I was jerked up out of the water and someone was pounding me on my back.  Coughing up water, I heard Sis talking to me.  She had been standing nearby and saw me face down in the water.  Realizing I was in trouble, she got to me quickly, pulled me out onto the  ground, and got me breathing again.  She saved my life.

In an earlier post on this blog my good friend, Connie, posed the question: “What Does Your Angel Look Like?”  On that summer day in 1946 my life-saving angel looked very much like Ruth ‘Sis’ Asbury, a seventeen-year-old who ‘just happened’ to be in the right place at the right time, recognized what had to be done, and did it. 

Sis Asbury is now Ruth Willoughby, and on January 13 of this year we shared our common birthday once again, thirteen years apart.  Sis is on Facebook, still looking well at 92.