Brent, our son, was coming home for Christmas! My wife Jeanette, and I pointed our van north up U.S. Hwy. 65 to pick him up from his Central Bible College dorm in Springfield, Missouri, four and a half hours away. We couldn’t wait to see him. It had been a month, and Lord knows, we worried so much about him living on his own.
The night before, at 2 a.m., Jeanette had woken up with a start. She’d had a bad dream. The details were hazy; all she held onto was an image of a stranger, who had been comforting, somewhat. But the rest of the dream disturbed her – and when she told me about it the next morning, it disturbed me, too. Brent is in some kind of danger.
Jeanette kept trying to dismiss the thought. “I kept telling myself, this is crazy. You’re just a worrier,” she said.
But the feeling wouldn’t go away. While I slept, she said, she’d slipped out of bed and gone to Brent’s room. She reached his bed and got down on her knees. “Lord,” she prayed, “only you know why I have this feeling, but I know you will take care of my son.”
Jeanette and I finally arrived at Brent’s dorm. He looked healthy, happy. Together, the three of us loaded his clothes, laptop and a few other things into the van. As we pulled onto the road, however, Brent got quiet. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Mom, Dad,” Brent began, “I debated even telling you this, because I didn’t want you to worry, but something happened last night.”
About 2 a.m., he said, he and his girlfriend driving back from a date. “The streets were covered with ice,” he said. “I was driving and we slid off the road into a ditch. No one was hurt, but since we figured we wouldn’t be outside long, neither of us was wearing warm clothes.”
The chill had just begun to get to them when from the top of a distant hill, a tow truck appeared. “It was like an answer to a prayer,” Brent said. The tow truck pulled them from the ditch and the driver followed them to an all-night service station.
“We went inside to get some hot chocolate and warm up when I realized we hadn’t thanked the driver,” Brent said.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Jeanette interrupted.
He shook his head. “Mom,” he said, “I tried. I went back outside, but the truck was gone. I asked if anyone had seen him, maybe they knew him or what company the truck was from. But everyone looked at me funny. They said we’d pulled in alone. No one had seen any tow truck.”
No one there had. But Jeanette did. The stranger in her dream? He was a tow truck driver.
