“Look Behind You!”
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I was excited! I was six years old, and for the first time, my parents were allowing me to walk to Friday evening vespers by myself with my friend Jill.
It was always dark by 6:30 P.M. at the Kamagambo Teachers Training College in Kenya, where we lived, so when I left to walk to Jill’s house, I carried my flashlight and carefully shone it down the road ahead of me. I did not want to step on a snake! Jill was ready when I knocked on her door, and we set off hand in hand, chattering excitedly.
But strangely, as we passed the building with the campus generator, we both fell silent. Then, ringing through the silence, I heard a powerful, resonating voice, “Diane, look behind you!” Startled and fearful because nobody else was nearby, I looked around and then turned toward Jill, clutching her hand, and said, “Jill, look behind us.” We turned and looked behind us. There, maybe three feet behind us, was a huge hooded cobra, raised up and ready to strike. If it bit us, we would be dead in a matter of minutes. “Run! Run!” we shouted in unison and ran for our lives! When we arrived at the church, panting and terrified, we asked each other why we had looked back. “I heard a voice say, ‘Jill, look behind you,’ and then you told me to look too,” Jill told me, wide-eyed. In amazement, I told her I heard the voice say my name! Tingling with wonder, we recognized that we had heard the voices of our guardian angels, who saved at least one of us from certain death. I have never forgotten that experience and will never doubt God’s existence and tender, personal care. Sister, what memories haunt you from the past year? Regrets, bitterness, sadness, or resentment? Did you leave problems unresolved, misunderstandings unclarified, or wounds unhealed? Did you make mistakes? Are you ready to try again? Your heavenly Father speaks to you with tenderness and power: “My dear daughter, look behind you!” Remember, “we have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history.”*
Diane Duncan de Aguirre
* Ellen G. White, Last Day Events (Nampa, ID: Pacific Press®, 1992), 72.
