The Day That Spirit Had My Back

A tale of life-saving, doubt-crushing, encounters of the spiritual kind

Healing can be very challenging. We have to look at and feel the repressed emotions and trauma from our past in order to fully release them and their impact. It’s quite common that even the most spiritually aligned and inclined of us start to question the role and involvement of Spirit in our lives when all we can see and feel is the hard stuff.

I’ve had many moments like these in my life. It’s a normal part of being human. When the going gets tough, though, there is a memory from my past that always pops into my awareness. I truly believe this story takes up space in my memory vault purely as a reminder that somebody up there has my back, even if I can’t see it.

One late autumn morning of my senior year of high school, I was driving to school just before sunrise down the 50mph two lane road that led to the next town. The road was tree lined and not well lit, but I had traveled this road hundreds of times throughout my life, both as a passenger and driver, so I knew it like the back of my hand.

As I approached the end of the turnpike, to the right was a steep brush and tree covered hill, and to the left was the opposite lane of traffic with no cars to be seen in either direction. It was another normal morning driving down this very normal road, when suddenly I heard a voice say, “Stop.” I shot a glance over to the passenger seat next to me nearly expecting to see someone sitting there. The voice I heard was a male voice, plain as day, and was so loud it was as if a person had somehow manifested themselves into the car and had spoken to me, yet no one was there. I directed my attention back to the road, and just as I began to dismiss my experience as the hallucination of an overly-tired teenager, I heard the voice again, only this time it was more insistent. “STOP NOW!”

Without thinking twice, I heeded the phantom voice and slammed on the brakes. I went from 50 to 0 in no-time flat, and just as the car came to a screeching halt in the middle of the road, a huge buck with a full rack leapt out of the brush to my right. He crossed the road no more than a few feet in front of my car. If I had not stopped when I did for no apparent reason at all, I would have certainly hit the deer going 50 m.p.h. in a small sedan. I likely would have been killed, and if not, severely injured.

I don’t think I said a single word for the rest of the day. I wasn’t sure whether I was more upset by the fact that I had almost died on the way to school that morning, or by the fact that I had been saved by a phantom voice in my car that I had heard not once, but twice.

This was the first time I experienced blatant psychic phenomena in my life, and it took many, many other experiences before I was finally able to accept the intuitive part of myself as my truth. I could have easily dismissed the voice as my mind playing tricks on me if nothing had happened at all that morning, but the fact that I acted on the voice’s direction and that my action saved my life was not something I could explain away.

Now twenty-five years later I have intuitive experiences on a daily basis. My intuition is so integrated into my life that I rarely even think about it. Yet that struggle to trust Spirit still rears its head on rare occasions. We all struggle with it. It doesn’t matter how much experience we have, how much healing we’ve done, how connected we feel, or how “spiritual” we are. If we can doubt ourselves, we can doubt anyone else too, including Spirit.

It’s during these times that I think back to that morning on the turnpike. I didn’t know what spiritual meant. I didn’t know I was intuitive. I didn’t have a clue about spirit guides. I did know that I wasn’t meant to die that day, though. I like to tell myself that if Spirit could take care of me then, it can take care of me now… and maybe, just maybe, Spirit is taking care of you too.