She checked on her
six-year-old son, Joshua, who was riding an old lawn mower that
his dad had adjusted to go very slowly, so Joshua wouldn’t get
hurt.
Their son was enthralled with all things mechanical, and
probably knew more about the tractor than she did. Nevertheless,
she would be extremely careful. “Stay over there, Joshua,” she
called to him. “I’m going to cut the grass on this side.”
Up and over and into the seat before she had time to reconsider.
The wheels on the tractor were up to her nose, and the cutting
blade was seven feet long. It all looked potentially lethal….
She wouldn’t think about any of that. Plenty of women drove
tractors. She turned on the ignition, and the engine sprang to
life.
One pass along the outside of the grass, turn, and then another
pass. Susan was doing just fine. Joshua had approached once,
yelling something, but she couldn’t hear him and had waved him
away. Now he was back on the safe side of the lawn. Or was he?
Suddenly Susan realized that Josh was not where she’d thought he
was. Frantically she looked around. There he was, off the lawn
mower, running right alongside her! “Josh, get away!” Susan
stepped on the brakes.
“Mom, you’re not cutting it right!” she heard him shout. Then
Josh attempted to jump onto the tractor. In a horrified moment,
Susan’s feet came off the pedals, throwing Joshua off. He slid
beneath the tractor, and the huge wheel rolled over---and
stopped---on his stomach and chest. She could only see his head,
sticking out from beneath the machine. “Josh!” Susan screamed,
trying to turn off the engine. Her husband came running from the
front yard. “He’s under the wheel! I’ve killed him!” Susan
leaped off, as her husband cut the tractor’s power. Both parents
rushed to Josh. As if in a dream, Susan noticed that her son was
now lying on his side, with the wheel off of him, and had
somehow avoided the blades. “I’ll get him out!” Susan’s husband
said. She ran for the phone in the house. To this day she does
not remember her feet ever touching the ground.
The shock of the unbelievable scene stayed with her as she
phoned the paramedics. Why hadn’t she been more careful? The
wheel could have cut off his air supply---and had the blade done
damage she hadn’t yet seen? God, God… Her heart seemed ready to
burst.
Since the Archies lived so far into the country, Susan asked the
paramedics to meet her and Josh at a country store several miles
away, rather than waste precious time giving them directions.
She ran back to the yard. Her husband had somehow gotten Josh
out from under the tractor, and he was lying on the ground.
Stunned, she realized the six-year-old was conscious and
breathing, and there was no sign that he had been cut by the
blade. “I’m okay, Daddy, it doesn’t hurt,” Josh was protesting.
“Lie still, Josh, and don’t talk,” the adults told him as they
carefully carried him to the truck. He couldn’t be okay, Susan
thought. She had felt the huge wheel go over him. His lungs must
be crushed, and as for internal injuries….she didn’t want to
think. Would Joshua die because she hadn’t learned to drive the
tractor? From her cell phone, she again called 911 to update the
ambulance, and then called her mother to alert her church’s
prayer chain. Word immediately went out over the hills and
hamlets. There was power in prayer. But could it save Joshua’s
life?
The truck sped down the country road. Before they even reached
the country store, Susan saw the paramedics pull up. They had
apparently decided to airlift Josh to a larger hospital, because
the Lifeflight helicopter set down in the parking lot just a few
minutes later. Susan and her husband would have to drive, since
there wasn’t room in the helicopter for them. “As they were
getting ready to put Joshua in the helicopter, I kissed him and
told him that I loved him,” Susan says. “He told me again that
he was okay.” She watched the plane take off, asking angels to
encircle it. Then as
she and her husband pulled out of the parking lot, Susan noticed
that the lot was almost full. People….people she knew, and some
she didn’t, all alerted to Joshua’s condition, she realized.
They had come to the store to offer silent support, just to let
her know they were praying. Tears streamed down her cheeks. God,
God….
Susan prayed all the way. And
when they finally entered the emergency room, the first voice
she heard was her son’s. “My mama wasn’t cutting the grass
right,” he was explaining to someone.
“That’s Joshua!” she shouted. “Where is he?”
Physicians checked every inch of
Josh, and ran several scans. They discovered that his liver had
been almost cut in two, his lungs were bruised and two ribs
cracked. Yet aside from bloodshot eyes due to the pressure of
the tractor, Joshua looked almost the same. It was almost
unbelievable that he did not have more serious injuries, Nor was
he in any pain. “I want to go home, Mom,” he kept telling Susan.
“I feel fine, honest.” A very lucky little boy…
Yet Susan knew it was far more than luck. From the moment she
had asked for prayers, they had come. The first gathering in the
parking lot led to visits, people dropping off notes at her
house, and phoning the hospital, leaving messages of hope.
Others wrote letters from faraway places, people from all
faiths, all assuring her that they were praying for her son’s
healing. Again, she remembered the moment of the accident, and
her bewilderment that Josh had been run over while lying on his
back, and yet when she reached him, he was on his side, with the
wheel completely off.
“He seemed completely normal,” Susan says. “Despite his IV, he
was hungry, and after the first night, he actually roamed the
hospital halls, looking for something to do.” The liver mended
without surgery.
Josh went home in less than a week, and has had no ill effects.
One night shortly after his release from the hospital, he and
Susan were talking about the accident. “Did it hurt when the
tractor ran over you?” she asked.
“I didn’t feel it run over me,” Josh says. “God was with me.”
God, and a team of angels to
lift the wheel, summoned by prayer.
You can purchase a copy of Guardian Angels from
Loyola Press
or from
Amazon.com.
You can also buy it from me for $15 plus $4 for shipping/handling.
Send a check to Joan Anderson at PO Box 127, Prospect Heights IL 60070 and
let me know to whom I should autograph it.
For two books, add $5 for
postage; for 3 copies, add $7 for postage. For 4 or more books, add
$9 for postage. Orders, of course, can be mixed---see the other
angel books available from this website. |
