Christmas Miracles (8 page)

O
n Christmas Day 1989, Melissa Bauer's father asked her if she wanted to go along with him when he took Grandmother Bauer home after her holiday visit with the family.

“I was thirteen that Christmas,” Melissa said, “and I felt so special that Dad had asked me to ride with them and keep him company on the drive back. In years past, he would have asked my older sister Marilyn, who was home from college for the holidays. I was really surprised that he asked me, because I expected him to say that the drive back would give him a chance to catch up with Marilyn since she had been away for three months. After all, I had been around and underfoot during that period of time. But then, Dad and I hadn't communicated much either, because he was always so busy.”

Melissa also looked forward to talking with Grandmother Bauer during the trip to her house.

“Grandma was a hoot, always laughing and telling jokes about what she did when she was a teenager back in the Roaring Twenties,” Melissa said. “I think she kind of embarrassed Dad sometimes when she told anyone who would listen to her stories she had been a flapper who had frequented speakeasy hideaways. I swore that I would never tell anyone the family secrets— which was a fib, because those stories were too good to keep out of the widest possible circulation.”

Grandmother Bauer lived in a nearby village in New Hampshire, and it took about twenty minutes to drive between the two homes.

“After we saw Grandma safely to her door and inside to her favorite chair in her living room, Dad and I headed back home—in a sudden sleet storm,” Melissa recalled. “Grandma said that we should stay until the sleet let up, but Dad said that it could last all night and only get progressively worse. It was his responsibility to open up the supermarket the next morning, so he had to get home that night.”

As the storm worsened and the roads became slick and treacherous, Melissa's father took his right hand very briefly off the steering wheel to pat her on the shoulder.

“I'm glad you're with me tonight,” he said. “I wouldn't like to be alone in this mess.”

Melissa remembered that the loving gesture from her father made her feel wonderful and wanted.

“I just felt all warm and fuzzy inside,” she said. “I wanted so much to have Dad's approval and to know that I was as special to him as Marilyn had always seemed to have been. I guess it is only natural that the older child gets a bit more attention just because she arrived first on the planet, but I do admit to having had a little sliver of sibling rivalry stuck in my psyche.”

And then it became obvious to her that her father was having difficulty negotiating the familiar New Hampshire hills and curves with their new coating of freezing sleet.

But these roads weren't familiar. Melissa and her father were somewhere on a very dark and winding road and sliding backward.

“Where are we, Dad?” Melissa asked, not recognizing the area.

“I . . . I took a shortcut,” he explained. “Thought it would be safer on this old road. No one travels it much any more.”

Melissa remembered how she began thinking that they could slide into the ditch and not be found on the lonely stretch of road for days.

Her father was attempting to appear very calm and confident, but she knew his mannerisms too well not to recognize that he was extremely nervous and uncertain.

“Melissa, please, roll down your window and watch very carefully that I don't get too close to the edge,” he asked. “I . . . think it could be quite a drop-off around here. Can't tell in the dark, of course. But I have driven this old road in daylight; I think I remember some pretty good drop-offs along this stretch. Just keep a really sharp eye.”

Melissa rolled down the window and saw by the illumination from the car's back-up lights that their rear wheels appeared to be on the very edge of the gravel. She had no idea how much control her father had on the slick road, but he appeared to have managed to stop the car from sliding.

“Don't back up another inch, Dad,” she shouted. Her face was stinging from the sleet and the cold, but she felt strangely exhilarated by the precarious situation.

“I was needed,” she said. “Dad and Mom had always taken such good care of me, but that night, Dad really needed my help. He couldn't see clearly out the rear window that was coated with freezing sleet. And he wouldn't dare get out of the car to check for fear it would slide away from him. He really needed me to watch for the edge of the road.”

In the dim light from the dashboard, Melissa could see that her father was sweating heavily, even with the open window letting in the cold.

“I'm going to release the brake and carefully accelerate,” he said, explaining his plan of action. “I hope we're on a patch of gravel where we can find enough traction to allow me to stop sliding backward and to move forward up this hill. If I can do that, we will be home free—I know it! There's an old covered bridge just over the top and then it's downhill all the way.”

Melissa offered her encouragement. “Go for it, Dad.”

“Easy now,” he said, “I'm going very easy. Keep watching the edge, honey.”

Melissa's face was numb from the cold and the sleet, but she kept looking out the window.

“That's when I saw directly behind us and just above us a brilliant white light with a bluish center,” she recalled. “I don't know where it had come from. It hadn't been there moments before—and then there it was. It was strangely beautiful, and it appeared to move higher, then lower, as if it were somehow intelligently surveying our dilemma.

“I didn't hear a voice,” Melissa said, “but I knew that I was receiving a message from the light that told me not to worry, that Dad and I would be all right. Somehow that light and I were connected in some mysterious and glorious way.”

Melissa's father released the brake and gently pressed on the accelerator—but to his alarm, the car began sliding backward.

“Melissa, I can't control the car,” he said, unable to keep the panic from his voice. “I'm sorry. We're sliding backward. Hold on, honey, we could go in the ditch and tip over. Be sure your seatbelt is buckled!”

She tried to calm her father, to tell him not to be frightened. She knew that somehow the mysterious light was in control and that they would not be harmed.

The car went backward all the way to the base of the hill, and Melissa saw the light spin off into a clump of trees, then either disappear or blink out in the darkness.

“We hadn't sat there very long when a highway patrol car pulled alongside of us,” Melissa said. “The officers told us that we shouldn't try to travel up the hill. The old covered bridge had collapsed and passage would be impossible. There was nothing left up there but some broken and rotted planks and a long drop into the river. Up ahead, though, they said, was a road that would lead us back to the main highway where crews had already applied salt and sand to the slickest places.”

The remainder of the drive back home was uneventful. Melissa's father praised her for being so helpful, for keeping an eye on the edge of the road, and for paying no mind to the cold and sleet that he knew had to be stinging her face.

“I had truly bonded with my father that Christmas Day,” Melissa said, “but I had also bonded with something incredibly mysterious that represented a source of strength outside of myself that has returned time and again in my memory to give me courage during some very dark moments.

“I don't know if that light was an angel or an unknown intelligence of some kind. And I don't know why I felt so much a part of it. All I know for certain is that whatever it was, it became the Christmas miracle that probably saved my dad and me from injury or worse during that sleet storm.”

D
ave Bennett was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 lung and bone cancer. The cancer in his spinal column has already gnawed away at the top three discs. This kind of deterioration causes excruciating pain—add to that difficulty breathing, nausea, weakness, and debilitating tiredness from intensive chemotherapy treatments and radiation, and it becomes difficult to feel much other than agony and despair. The doctors are unable to tell Dave just how long he might expect to live. He and his wife, Cindy, are looking at an optimistic ten-year plan, yet are getting his affairs in order. That tells you something about them.

Cindy said they have had a deluge of well-meaning people offering suggestions for various techniques to try to recover. “Suggestions range from jumping up and down on a trampoline to drinking a healing Essiac Tea and all kinds of things in between,” she shared. Confirming Dave would definitely not be trying the trampoline cure, she added that he does have a strong personal connection with Spirit and is able to sift through suggested cures and take what works best for him.

Dave is not afraid to die. He has done that already. In fact his near-death experience completely transformed and redirected his life many years before. While out at sea, working on a research vessel, Dave suffered an agonizing death of slowly drowning after being tossed about like a rag doll in a raging storm. He described the pain of being submersed and tossed about in dark, murky salt water with lungs near bursting and burning in need of a crucial breath of air. Just as the pain intensified to an overwhelming degree, it suddenly reverted and began to fade a little at a time until it was completely gone. Then everything went cold and dark—a cold darkness. That was how Dave described the event.

The rest of the experience is nearly the classic near-death account—of a gradual light becoming so bright and warm and full of love that one has no desire to ever leave it. Being one with the light and its love, without a physical body and no pain, suddenly other “light beings” came toward him. Dave felt he knew them and they knew him as they were supporting and helping him to adjust.

Then, before he was able to communicate with any of them, he experienced a “life review” where every minor and major thing he had said, done, and thought, and how it had affected the lives of those around him when he was alive, flashed before him. Supernaturally, he was able to review the feelings of others as the result of his actions—all the joy, happiness, heartache, disappointment, love, hurt, sorrow, grief —but all without the accompanying guilt or judgment. All the subtle interactions of his entire life were ineffably experienced. He knew the review was shown him not to be judged, but to learn and grow from.

“It felt like coming home,” Dave said. “I experienced a love and acceptance like I had never felt before.” Then others seemed to join the first group that had surrounded him, and Dave began to see things that were not familiar to him at all. The “others” remained supportive, but Dave felt disoriented. He thought he was looking into his future!

The clearly audible words, “This is not your time, you must return,” interrupted with a bang. Like a cannon, shooting him back to his earthly body, then again, “This is not your time, you have a purpose!” Dave described the fact of “having to return” as a more painful contrast to the love and peace than the actual pain of drowning. All of this seemed to be a prelude to a miracle that was to occur on Christmas 2000.

This would be the first Christmas that Cindy would not be with the rest of her family in thirty-nine years, and she was feeling the pangs of self-inflicted guilt for not making a six-hour drive to spend even a few hours with them. Exposing Dave to any cold or flu germs could be fatal, as both radiation and chemotherapy deplete the white blood cells, thereby severely compromising the immune system of the patient.

Although she probably could have made the drive by herself, it didn't feel right leaving Dave home alone on Christmas. Even though many of the out-of-town family would have already left, Cindy planned to make the drive alone, the day after Christmas, depending on how Dave felt. She did not yet know there was likely a “higher power” at work in the decision to stay home.