The rock was bigger than a watermelon, and when I uncovered it in the field I was plowing that November, it was smudged with black earth. In the spring, I came back with a power scoop to take it away, and the winter rains and snows had washed it clean. I stared. Right on the face of that big, dark boulder, a pink cross stood out, clear as if it had been chiseled.
“Why, that’s the cross of Christ,” I said to myself. “This isn’t going to any rock pile. It’s a holy thing!”
I hauled it up to the house to show my wife Bun, and she felt the same way I did. We got to thinking about God telling the Israelites to keep a sign of their faith written on the doorposts of their houses, and we decided to set it up by our door.
Everybody who saw it thought the rock was unusual—even before we had the tornado in August 1979. Bun and I could hear the storm banging in the distance while we watched the news on TV. “Well, folks,” the weatherman said, “there’s a tornado watch, and my best advice is to keep an eye on the sky.”
“I’ll just go out and take a look,” I told Bun.
And, by golly, that thing was coming right at us—a wide, black funnel cutting through my cornfield, chewing up everything in its path, moving southwest to northeast the way tornados generally do.
Bun and I hid in the cellar and then the twister was on us, shaking the doors like demons from hell, the noise like an ungodly scream. We prayed. Our neighbors saw what happened.
Not once but twice that tornado came right up to our door where the rock with the cross of Christ sat—and each time it backed away!
