My middle son is 28 and a very big and healthy young man, but when he was 6 months old we had a close encounter of the best kind with the Word of God. Aaron was a winter baby, unlike his older and younger brothers, who were born in the summer time. Unlike them also, he had to be bottle fed due to his mother taking TB medication at the time.

One week during the summer Aaron was 6 months old he developed some sort of intestinal bug that had him losing control at both ends and not getting much sleep in the process. As you can imagine, when a 6 month old isn’t getting enough sleep, neither are Mom and Dad.

We called the doctor on the Saturday of the week and after finding that he was out of town and getting little assistance from the doctor covering for him, Aaron’s mother was becoming extremely concerned with how we were going to care for him. At this point I very distinctly heard a voice in my right ear say “This time it will be different.”

I turned to my wife and very calmly but firmly said “Fix a bottle. He will keep it down and sleep all night.” As she expressed doubts as to the wisdom of the action, I calmly repeated it. Aaron kept the bottle down and slept all night, giving Mom and Dad the first decent rest we had in better than a week.

Years alter that same small sweet voice of God came to me in a different context. I had been driving out of town to a job for a few months and one of the roads I had to travel near my home was a long hill, almost 3 miles. My car was having an overheating problem that day and I knew it would never make it up the hill without boiling over.

Saying a silent prayer I turned onto the road to the hill, which actually went downhill for a short distance. Again I heard a voice telling me “Don’t look at the temperature gage and you will see a miracle.” As the hill is long with several curves and an occasional deer on the road, it wasn’t too great a stretch not to look at the gage, but I wouldn’t have looked anyway, after receiving that message.

Past the summit of the hill I thought it was time to look at the gage and IT HAD DROPPED! That truly was a miracle because an auto will warm up going uphill but mine cooled off!

Richard Coleman drjekyll@hazleton.net