A Miracle on the Mountain

I don't know about you, but I believe in miracles. I see them every day. I actively look for them and find miracles in the most out-of-the-way places. Recently one of them happened to a young friend of mine.

This young man and his buddy had been up in the mountains working at a girl's camp. They'd selflessly gone up to teach a class on paint-ball and had stayed to work over night guarding the camp from bears, skunks, the occasional scorpion, and whatever else might go bump in the night. They'd stayed up all day and all night and the morning of the next day, volunteering with no pay but the knowledge that a hundred or so girls were safe and had fun that day.

Instead of sleeping before they went down the mountain, they took off after helping put the camp to rights.

This set of mountain roads are narrow; winding; have treacherous drop-offs which plunge thousands of feet to the valley floor; and lots of traffic of the car, truck, and bicycle variety. There are goose necks and switchbacks and blind corners. There have been a number of heartbreaking accidents on that stretch of road.

Luckily the driver didn't doze off on the upper slopes where the car could have careened off the cliff and plunged to the bottom, killing them both. He did it near mile marker one, where the shoulder is easy and not precipitant. He didn't hit another car. He over-corrected and rolled the car several times.

The driver was fairly unhurt (maybe a slight concussion) although he should have been thrown from the car.

The biggest miracles involved his sleeping passenger. That young man woke to find his hand crushed beneath the car. It was scraped and bleeding profusely. Luckily the driver and some ambulance personnel helped lift the car from his ragged hand.

It turns out that he was wearing a ring on that hand featuring footprints. It has to do with a poem called "Footprints in the Sand" in which Christ carries the subject of the poem during his darkest hours, leaving one set of footprints. That ring held the car off the boy's hand just high enough so the car didn't crush the bones, making re-constructive surgery possible.

The ring was unscratched.