Saved by an Angel?

When I was attending the University of Washington I worked the evening shift building furniture at Magna Design in Lynnwood. I rode to work on a motorcycle. One Friday night we stayed late to finish a project and I was driving South on I-5 at 2 AM. A strange feeling came upon me and I felt like I really needed to pray for my safety—so I did continuously as I drove home.

After exiting at 85^th St and heading toward Puget Sound I approached an intersection with a main arterial going North and South (Aurora Ave) and the light was red so I coasted towards the intersection. When I was about 100 yards away from the light it changed to green so accelerated to about 40 mph. At that time it was illegal to turn left at this intersection and there were at least three signs notifying people they were not to turn. When I just arrived in the intersection a large Plymouth 4 door sedan turned left into the lane I was driving in and my motorcycle hit the center post between the front and rear door in a T-bone collision. When I saw the car turning in front of me I had a couple of milliseconds to hit the brakes and the bike may have slowed down to 35 mph when the collision happened. The Plymouth drove off without stopping.

The strange thing was that my body never left the motorcycle. Normally accidents like this even at slower speeds results in the rider flying off the bike and over the obstacle they have hit.  But, I was standing upright holding on to the handlebars after the collision. Even stranger, I was still standing upright as witnesses ran up to find out if I was okay. After a couple of minutes I started to step down and tried to back the motorcycle out of the intersection, but it would not move. I got off of the bike and saw that both front forks had been bent back about 145 degrees and wedged in between the two exhaust pipes forming a tripod that kept the motorcycle upright. People were amazed, as was I, that I was not hurt. They were also angry that it was a hit and run and nobody had gotten a license number.

I examined myself and did not have a scratch or bruise on my body. It took two people to help me drag the motorcycle out of the intersection and on to the sidewalk. I was probably in shock for a few minutes. The police came and left saying there was nothing for them to do. My friend  Richard drove up in his pickup and took the motorcycle to my uncles Honda dealership so it could be fixed. At the shop we noticed that both scrambler handlebars had been bent upwards. A scrambler handlebar has a cross member support to keep the bar from bending. The left portion of the handlebar had been bent upwards about 2 inches and the right one about 4 inches. Being an engineering student my curiosity was peaked and I latter calculated the force that had been on my body due to de-accelerating from 35 mph to 0.0 mph so quickly was on the order of  90,000 lbs.

I am firmly convinced that the need to pray I felt was a message provided by God. And I believe to this day that there was a divine intervention that resulted in nothing happening to my body. I did not have any sore muscles, no cuts or abrasions and not even a bruise. Not that I can prove it, but I firmly believe that angels protected me that night.