My Guardian Angel
The grass whizzed by unceasingly, playing over and over like a bad daytime television show. The genre was bad, to make it worse: dusty roan, cracked and withered, stretching for miles and miles. It did not bother me much, though; I was a simple child, and still am. So here I was, sandwiched between my sisters, as some sort of barrier to keep them from squabbling in our family car, on my way from North Carolina to Houston, Texas.
After being on the road for one-and-a-half days with nothing to entertain me but the voices of my kin, I pretty much became dead like the landscape around me. So dead in fact, that I thought nothing of it when my dad pulled over to the side of the sandy, unpaved road. As both of my parents got out of the car, my sisters started shooting each other and me questioning looks; I could care less, to tell the truth. Outside, my parents’ voices mingled with another that was a stranger to me. Listening, I heard urgency, astonishment, and good amounts of “No, no, no.” from my parents, and they sounded like they were haggling with a Nigerian vendor. I also heard something else, which I would later learn was a Texas drawl. “Come on out of the car, girls.” My dad had opened the car door, and, unlike my sisters, I got out without hesitation. I stood, taking in the scene in like a black hole: the endless “road” and the knee-high sea of lifeless grass surrounding both its sides. Then I noticed him, standing behind our car.
His skin was a white-with-a-sunburn kind of shade, and his facial hair matched the grass in color and neatness. Dust and grime caked his worn overalls, which hung loosely like a boy’s saggy pants around his thin torso. His pickup truck had a companioning look, with rust dressing it from flatbed to brake; I could not even tell what color it was supposed to be, let alone why it was still working.
We all watched as the man went around to the back of his truck and heaved out a charcoal-colored tire. My dad offered up his help, but the man just replied,” Naw, it’s alright, I can handle this.” He rolled the tire up to the side of our car, when I noticed the front left tire for the first time. It looked like a donut would if someone from seven stories up had dropped it, and it landed standing straight up. I wondered how we hadn’t noticed this before. The man got out his equipment and got to work, cranking up the car while laying on his back, coating himself with the earth’s dust. As he replaced the tire, I found out from my mom that he had pulled us over when he saw the flat tire, and was fixing it for us. The first thing that popped into my mind when I learned this was, ‘Why?’
He did not take long at all, and when he was done, he got up, grunting all the way, and patted the dust off of his pants, which did no real good. My parents begged him to let them pay him, but he would accept nothing, and said that he was happy to help. He asked us to inspect it, so we gathered around the fresh tire. When everything looked fine, we turned to thank him, but he and his truck were nowhere to be found. We looked down the endless straight road, but we could see nothing moving in the distance. We had heard no door open, no engine start. Then my dad called out, and we started praising God and thanking him for keeping us safe.
Now that I am looking back on it, I can really see how God was merciful to us. If that “man” had not helped us, we would have been stranded out in the middle of nowhere! It has boosted my faith, experiencing something many people only dream of experiencing, and I am looking forward to seeing God’s hand at work again in the future.
It reminded me of a time when a guy came up to my family in a restaurant because he saw us pray before eating and noticed that my little brother is adopted. He then gave us a hundred bucks that he said he'd been saving for a family that needed it. It's so encouraging to see the helpful people that God puts in our lives. Anyway, I have no reviewing to do, I didn't notice any grammar or spelling mistakes. I just wanted to say good job.
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