Christmas Miracles (19 page)

“What in the world is this?” they both said in harmony. Daniel noticed a tag reading: “From Santa to the Gomez family”—so he carried the bag into the living room. It was completely filled with beautifully wrapped gifts, mostly for the kids, but there were several for Sarah and Daniel, too.

As they put the presents under the tree, tears of joy streamed down both their faces. This would be a Christmas they would never forget; one that through the caring and selfless giving of others had enriched their lives and deepened their bonds. They also knew that even if there had not been any gifts at all, the true treasures were found in faith, prayer, and each other. The miracles of this Christmas would last them a lifetime.

P
rayer can heal and transform a person's life any time of the year, but Delores Baca is convinced that prayers for mercy on the behalf of people in trouble have extra power during the Christmas season—and such prayers might even produce a special Christmas angel that can work a miracle, just as it happened for her.

A mother of three daughters who lives near Anaheim, California, Mrs. Baca had become a faithful member of the church prayer group that had been established by their priest.

“Father Gomez instituted a wonderful home enrichment program,” she said. “Those of us who wished could gather in one another's homes in groups and join with like-minded people who felt strength and unity in prayer. I will be forever grateful to God that I was a member of such a group, for just before Christmas in 1994, our prayers miraculously helped to save the life of my oldest daughter, Linda.”

One night in December when it was her turn to host and to conduct the prayer circle, Delores had a sudden frightening vision of Linda, who was driving home from college for Christmas vacation.

“Since I knew she would be leaving for home that day from Sacramento, I had been concerned all afternoon about her safety,” Delores said. “When the terrible images first appeared in my thoughts, I was fearful that my own anxiety was just creating negative pictures in my mind. But then, I reasoned, I surely did not have to be embarrassed to ask my prayer partners to pray with me for my daughter's safety.”

Before she could make the request, however, she received a terrible mental picture of Linda approaching a very dangerous stretch of highway.

“My inner vision seemed to take on a life of its own,” Delores said. “It was as if I was watching a motion picture beyond my control.”

Then, she remembers, she gasped aloud, hoping with all her mother's love that she was not seeing a true image of what was happening to Linda.

“I saw her car being struck by a large truck at a desolate intersection,” she said. “I felt as though I would faint when I saw in my mind's eye Linda's car being nearly demolished by the violent impact.”

Several of Delores Baca's prayer partners had noticed her anxious behavior, and they asked what was so troubling to her. Delores rose unsteadily to her feet and in a voice trembling with concern, she asked each of the twelve women assembled in her living room that evening to pray for Linda's safety.

“It was at the very moment that I declared my heartfelt plea for their prayers that the miracle occurred,” Delores said. “As I spoke the last word of my request for prayers for Linda, an overpowering spiritual presence seemed to enter the room and envelop everyone in it. I beheld a beautiful angelic figure clothed in gold-and-white light walk through the very midst of our prayer group and command, pray!

“Later, at least eight of the women said that they had also seen the beautiful angel of light, and everyone in the group had heard and heeded the command to pray for Linda as she traveled on the highway,” Delores said. “Each of us bowed our head in prayer, and we continued our supplication for about thirty minutes. At that time, we all heard the angel's voice say, ‘It is past.' ”

Late that evening when Linda arrived home, she told her parents and sisters of the harrowing experience that she had undergone while on the road. She had been crossing an intersection in a rather desolate area of highway when the brakes of a heavily loaded truck failed and sent it speeding unchecked directly at her car.

“It would have struck me broadside,” Linda said, shaking her head in bewildered memory of the near-fatal experience. “I should have been history. But somehow my car gave a sudden lurch and literally propelled me out of the truck's path. It almost felt as if my car were some kind of living thing that had the power to jump out of the truck's path. Or, even weirder, it kind of felt as though something just lifted my car out of harm's way.”

When Delores informed Linda of her vision of the accident, the combined power of the prayer group, and the manifestation of the angel of light, she was extremely moved.

“That would have been at exactly the time that I was approaching the intersection,” Linda verified. She sat for a few moments in complete silence, then she crossed herself and said that she must set out at once for church to light candles and to offer prayers of thanksgiving.

Delores said that the entire family accompanied Linda to the church that night.

“We all felt the need to kneel and give thanks for Linda's deliverance,” she said. “I cannot explain why the beautiful heavenly being of light chose to answer my pleas and lend its mighty energy and divine power to our prayer group that night. I have not always lived an exemplary life, but I shall be everlastingly grateful that the angel of the Lord had mercy and overlooked my trespasses and saved my daughter's life. Such a miracle was the most wonderful Christmas gift I have ever received.”

O
n Christmas morning, 1957, Mrs. Oleta A. Martin was straightening up the house for her children, who had arrived the night before with their families for a holiday dinner with all the trimmings. Then, suddenly, a pain near her heart made breathing so difficult that she could not even form words to call for help.

Her youngest daughter saw her agony and ran upstairs to awaken the rest of the late-sleeping family.

Oleta's husband moved her to a sofa, and the entire family stood by, helplessly watching the woman in her excruciating pain. Someone went to call for an ambulance.

Oleta Martin's eyes closed and she said later (“My Proof of Survival,”
Fate
magazine, June 1969) that she thought she was dying. She seemed to be floating away, and she lost all sensation of pain and all awareness of her surroundings.

When she stopped floating, she found herself at the edge of a wide chasm. It was so dark beneath her that she could not see the bottom. At first she experienced great fear, then calm, when a bright “spiritual” light appeared on the other side of the abyss.

She could make out the general form of a manlike being in the midst of the light, but the illumination was so brilliant that she couldn't distinguish any part of him from his shoulders up.

To the entity's left stood a dozen or so other beings in long, white garments. They seemed to be telling her not to be afraid, that she could cross the chasm without danger and that they would be waiting for her on the other side.

Oleta Martin remembered that she was eager to join them, but the awareness was heavy upon her that once she crossed that wide chasm she would never return. She thought of how greatly her youngest daughter still needed her and how much she would miss being a part of the rest of the family's individual lives.

The pressure on her chest returned. She gasped for breath and again became aware of the room around her. She opened her eyes wider to see her family's tears of worry and grief change to shouts of joyful surprise when they saw that she had smiled weakly.

Her assembled family members cried out “Mother!” in unison and moved toward her as one, but the paramedics who had arrived with the ambulance held them back with a warning that she had just had a very close call and must not become excited.

After a checkup at the clinic, Mrs. Martin gradually improved her heart condition with rest, medication, and a change of diet. Because of her Christmas miracle, she was given another chance to prepare for a more timely opportunity to cross the great chasm to the other side where the heavenly beings await her.

M
ike McGuire had a wife and six kids to support. He worked as a welder on a city maintenance crew in a large New England city from 6:30 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. and had a part-time job as an attendant at a self-serve gas station from 7:00 p.m. until midnight three nights a week. With six children, ages ranging from two to seventeen, eagerly counting the nights until Christmas Eve, Mike was trying to get as much overtime pay as he could so he could really pile up the presents under the tree. Everyone who knew Mike knew how crazy he was about his kids.

By 3:15 that afternoon, two days before Christmas Eve in 1991, the power-shovel crew had laid the last pipe in place for the day. At 3:30 sharp, the rest of the crew knocked off work for the day, but McGuire did not have to report for work at the gas station that night, so he decided to pick up some overtime by finishing the welding on the seam between the last two pipes in the trench.

“Mike, I'll buy you a beer, man,” his best friend Jimmy Wissler told him. “C'mon, it's cold out here. Let's warm up before we head for home.”

McGuire grinned at his buddy, Jimmy the bachelor, who never understood about paying dentist bills for braces and buying shoes for six pairs of feet that never seemed to stop outgrowing the new ones you'd bought just three months before.

“I'll take a raincheck, Jimmy,” McGuire told him. “This is my last chance for overtime before Christmas. Got to take it, man.”

Jimmy shrugged, waved a goodnight, and walked away to leave McGuire to crawl back down into the fourteen-foot trench that housed the new water pipes for a soon-to-open housing district.

“I had just finished my work on the inside seam and was about to begin on the outside of the joint when tons of earth, clay, and stones caved in around and upon me,” Mike McGuire said. “I had absolutely no warning of any kind. The damn trench had caved in on me silently and suddenly, as if it had just been waiting to trap me.”

McGuire was knocked down in a kneeling position against the big pipe. His nose was crunched up against the plate of his welding mask. For a few moments, he was conscious of searing pain as his right shoulder was pressed against the hot weld he had been making on the pipes. In agony, he tried desperately to squirm away from the burning pipe, but the press of the cave-in held his shoulder fast against the red-hot weld.

“The fact that I had been wearing my welding mask saved my life,” he said. “Without the pocket that the mask made around my face, the loose dirt would have covered my nose and mouth—and I would soon have suffocated.”

He lay very still, taking stock of his situation.

“I had been covered by a cave-in in a trench in a new housing district where there would probably be little if any traffic. That was definitely a negative,” he reasoned in his interior monologue.