The Lord is my Shepherd

Come and hear, all you who fear God, let me tell you what He has done for me (Ps. 66:16)

I woke up this morning with a vivid memory of the time I was almost kidnapped.  I don't know what triggered that memory this morning, but then I opened my meditation book to read the excerpt from Psalm 66 above.  And I realized that I needed to tell the story.

It was a beautiful spring morning.  I was 5 years old and not allowed to cross the street, so I was sitting on the sidewalk at the corner, watching children playing in the next block.  I can still recall the feel of the pavement under me and the soft breeze around me.  We lived on one of the only connecting streets between Airline Hwy and Metairie Road, so I was used to constant traffic on our street.  An old red pickup truck passed me and then braked about halfway down the next block.  I remember thinking that the driver must have wanted to turn at the corner where I was sitting.  Before the truck began to back up, I heard a commanding voice just above me and on my right hand side:  RUN, GAYLE, RUN!!  

At the time, I had never heard anything about kidnapping.  I'm quite sure the word was not in my vocabulary.  But the Voice that spoke to me was not to be questioned or ignored.  I was not really afraid, but just obeying the Voice.   I got up and started running for home, hearing the truck backing up and stopping at the corner.  There were only 3 houses on our block, so I was at the second house when I heard one of the men say, "Get her, Joe."  Then I was afraid, but when I turned up the driveway to my house, the two men turned back to their truck.  I ran in the back door, screaming, and wrapped my arms around my mom's legs. 

When I could tell her what happened, she called the police, but there was little I could tell them other than the red truck.  A few days later, I asked my mom whose voice has spoken to me.  She told me that it was my guardian angel, the first I had ever heard about a guardian angel.  But when I started school the next September, there was a very large painting in my first-grade classroom of an angel shepherding two small children across a narrow bridge -- and I knew then what a "guardian angel" did.

I have often wondered why I was preserved that day, when so many children have suffered kidnapping and harm.  But I have never forgotten or taken for granted the Voice and the Angel that saved my life.