[title subtitle=”words & images Marcus Coker”][/title]
In 2010, the Pew Forum on Religion issued the results of their latest survey. In it they found that seventy-nine percent of Americans believe in miracles. It’s an astounding number, but if you ask your friends, or read widely, or eavesdrop at your local coffee shop, you’ll likely hear stories that can’t be explained any other way.
Lee Garrett, seventy-two, sits down on a Tuesday afternoon in Muldrow, Oklahoma, to talk about the night she experienced a miracle. For the last twenty years, she’s only told a few close friends and relatives because she’s been afraid that no one would believe her. But last fall, Lee opened the paper and read a story about the remains of three people that were recovered from the bottom of a lake after they’d been missing for decades. Realizing that could have easily been her own fate, Lee recalls the night she almost died.
It was the spring of 1994, and Lee was visiting her friend Charles and his son near Greers Ferry Lake, which is about sixty miles north of Little Rock, Arkansas. Lee was interested in observing Passover, which celebrates God freeing the Israelites after years of slavery in Egypt. She and Charles planned to attend the service in Heber Springs that night. Lee says, “First, we went downtown to have lunch, and Charles had a dozen oysters in a half shell, and when we walked out, he bent over and started turning gray. Well, he had food poisoning.”
That evening, Charles said his son could take care of him and insisted that Lee go to the Passover service by herself. She agreed, took a hand-drawn map to find her way, and walked out into the rainy night.
The service was about four or five miles away, and Lee made it there fine. “It was over about 9:30, and it was still raining,” says Lee. “I don’t see too well in the dark, but I see less well when it’s raining. So before I left the parking lot, I pulled under a light to look at the map and I thought I had it pretty good in my head. But as I was driving down the road, I noticed a white wooden fence beside me, one I didn’t notice on the way there. And I know I would have seen it because that’s my favorite kind of fence.”
Lee tried looking at the map again. “I couldn’t tell anything. I didn’t know where I was. Then all of a sudden, I heard, ‘Stop the car.’ It was just clear as day. I heard this male voice say, ‘Stop the car.’”
Lee slowed down, but she didn’t stop. Lost in an unfamiliar place and confused by the voice she’d just heard, she gripped the steering wheel harder and leaned forward to try to get her bearings. “I took my foot off the gas and thought, Who said that? Where are you? I didn’t know what to think. I probably went another half a block. And I’m just battling in my mind thinking, Why do I want to stop the car?”
And then the voice spoke again — “Stop the car.”
“It wasn’t in my head,” says Lee. “The car was filled with the sound of the voice. It wasn’t screaming; it was very calm. And although it wasn’t demanding or commanding, it was very authoritative. ‘Stop the car.’”
“My hands were frozen to the wheel. Then all of a sudden — WHOMP — my car stopped.” As Lee tells the story, she begins to cry, now knowing that her life was saved that night. “My car just stopped. There was this huge force, this thing, and it just stopped my car. It didn’t skid to a stop; it didn’t lunge forward. I was driving one second, and the next second, I was just stopped.”
“It was completely black, and all I could hear was my windshield wipers. I was scared to death. You can’t imagine what your mind is going through, being lost on a dark, rainy night and hearing a strange voice. I just sat there for what seemed like hours, but it was probably only two minutes in reality.”
Finally, Lee rolled down her window, a little at first, then a little more. “I saw this movement in front of me that made me dizzy, like a rippling, and I realized it was water. And then it all made sense.”
Lee’s front tires were sitting at the edge of Greers Ferry Lake, and something, or someone, had kept her from driving her car straight into it. “A chill went through me,” says Lee. “I’m terrified of anything more than a bathtub full of water. I can’t swim a lick.”
But there she was, sitting at the end of a poorly marked boat ramp, shaking from fear, wet from the rain coming in her window. Knowing she had to do something, she decided to back up cautiously. And as she reached for the gearshift, she noticed that her car was sitting in drive, and her foot wasn’t on the brake. “I remember putting my foot on the brake to change the gear to reverse very distinctly,” says Lee. “You had to do that in that car.”
As Lee drove away, she stopped in a little dirt driveway to turn around. “I still couldn’t see well because of the rain and the dark, and I thought, I don’t know where I am or how I’m going to get back. And the next thing I knew, I was sitting in the driveway of Charles’s house. I still don’t know how I got there. By the time I got inside and looked at a clock, it was 10:40.”
When Lee told her story to her friend Charles, he cautioned her against sharing her experience with too many people. He likely felt, as she did, that no one would believe her. A disembodied voice, a dark road, a rainy night — it sounded too much like fiction. But later, as Lee fought to go to sleep, she understood what really occurred. “I sat in bed all night, trying to wrap my brain around what happened. And I kept thinking, This is a miracle. The hand of God came down out of heaven and stopped my car.”
For the last twenty years, Lee has thought about that night in 1994. She’s replayed it over and over again and tried to explain it logically, but she just can’t. “Lately, I’ve been losing sleep over it. When I read about the three teenagers who disappeared in 1970, it sent a chill up my spine. They were on their way to an Elk City football game and never showed up. Recently, their skeletons were found (still inside their car) in Foss Lake, in Custer County, Oklahoma. No one knows exactly what happened, but it made me think, That could have been me. I could have driven right off that boat ramp, and no one would have known where to look.”
In opening up about that rainy night, Lee is hopeful for many things. She says, “For a long time, I’ve thought that boat ramps should be marked more clearly, that families of missing persons should include local lakes in their search efforts. But mostly I think that if my story can help just one person in any way, I’ll be happy.” Lee hopes that others will be encouraged to tell their own extraordinary stories, ones similar to hers, ones that will remind us that we are not alone, that we are cared for, and that the world is both a mysterious and miraculous place to live.
