When I was either in my late teens or early twenties, I had an experience which can only be explained as a genuine miracle. Just east of where I grew up, on old Highway 82 about six miles West of Reform, Alabama, was a curve that was known locally as Dead Man's Curve. It is still there, but when they four-laned the highway, they cut off the stretch of the old road on which this curve is situated.

It is difficult to describe that curve, but I'll try. If you were going West, it wasn't so bad, but if you were going East, and didn't know the road, or were just going too fast, it would surprise you. Going East, you would think you were on a straight stretch of road, when suddenly you dropped down a little hill, while at the same time going into a curve to your right. To make matters much worse, in the middle of that curve was a narrow bridge, over a small creek. And to top it off, that curve was banked to the outside, not the inside as it should have been, so that, as you dropped off that hill and tried to compensate for this unexpected curve, you were being thrown, so to speak, into the oncoming lane. It was a though the engineers had designed this place to kill people.

I once asked an old, experienced State Trooper how many people had been killed in that curve, and he told me, to the best of his knowledge, about 40 people had died there between the time Highway 82 was first paved up until this death trap was by-passed. As we were the closest house to the curve, up until we moved a ways down the road when I was fifteen, many was the time that we received a knock on the door - at all hours of the day and night - from someone who had either survived or happened upon the latest wreck there. It seemed to me that almost every time that knock came, someone had died.

I will never forget the day, when I was about twelve, when my father took me down the road - it was only a couple hundred yards from the house - to see one of those wrecks. A car had been going too fast, was thrown into that outside lane, and hit an eighteen-wheeler head-on. It was the first time I had ever seen someone dead - the man and woman in the car had been literally torn to pieces, and the two men in the truck weren't expected to live (somehow, they did). The slender body of the woman lay on the asphalt, under a blanket, but the man in the car looked like he had been butchered with a machete. And I was only twelve.

On the day of my miracle, I was driving home, with my Mom in the car beside me on the front seat. We were in a Ford LTD, I believe - late 60s or early 70s. We were headed West, having come from Reform, where both my Mom and my Dad ran businesses, and were already crossing that deadly bridge when we saw an eighteen-wheeler (we called them "transfer trucks" in those days) come over that little hill. He was going too fast, apparently unfamiliar with the roadway, and was thrown into our lane of traffic. He was at least two feet over the line, and we had nowhere to go to avoid him, with a heavy concrete guard rail beside us on the bridge. In that instant I knew we were about to die. The trucker couldn't pull that heavy rig back into his lane and it was way too late for either of us to hit the brakes.

Although the trucker couldn't avoid us, and we couldn't avoid him, and although he was rapidly headed straight for our car, he did not touch us! This was an absolute impossibility - but it had just happened! It was as though he had passed through the car like a ghost, but he and his rig were very real. As soon as he had passed by, I looked over at my Mom and said to her "You're as white as a sheet". She said "You are, too". We never talked about this incident much after that - I suppose because we didn't know what to say. We could not understand what we had experienced, or why we were still alive, untouched and unharmed. But I think we both knew, from the start, that we had just experienced the super-natural. 

I have come close to death several times, once, as a child, from choking, once from almost being trampled by a horse, and once from having an "unloaded" .357 Magnum pistol go off in my hand, with the bullet passing so close to my forehead it clipped hair off my head, plus a few other times, but in all those instances there was an explanation for why I survived. On the day of my miracle, there was none. None at all.

Many and many is the time I have reflected upon that day, and it is my firm conviction that God, by the touch of His loving hand, worked a miracle that day and stayed Death from our door. Both Mom (she is alive and well, all these decades later, and now 80 years of age) and I are testament to this miracle. God had a purpose for keeping us here. That I know for sure. And it is this knowledge which has often guided my decisions as to how I relate to my fellow man. 

        
 Copyright 2008 by Tom Woodard

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