Guardian Angel Saved My Life

I have had several occasions in my life in which I felt the presence of a guardian angel that intervened and saved my life. Although I am not a Christian believer, more of a Buddhist if I am anything at all, these incidences have led me to conclude there is something out there besides ourselves and that sometimes the universe intervenes in our life.

You can call that Brahma, Buddha, Ganesh, a Guardian angel, God, the great spirit. I don't know what to call it. All I know is that it is real because it happened to me at least three or four times in my life. The first time and perhaps the most powerful incident occurred back in 1990 when I was living in South Korea teaching English at a Korean university after finishing graduate school in Korean studies.

My Korean-born wife had joined the U.S. Army as an officer and was stationed in Korea for her first assignment. It was a beautiful spring weekend. We decided we would take a few days to drive off to the East Coast. We had not had a real vacation in a while. It would be about a five to six-hour drive.

My wife is a very focused person, and when she is driving, she has a set time and wants to make the miles with no delay or to stop. I am the opposite, often like to just stop here and there along the way to see the sights, take a break, use the facilities, grab something to eat, etc.

On that particular day, we left about 11:00 a.m., and around 2:30 p.m. or so we see the signs for a national park I have not been to. We were driving by the town of Wonju, which is a mountain town about maybe a couple of hours from Seoul. Traffic was pretty bad because it was a holiday weekend and we were contemplating what to do because the traffic was getting pretty bad.

Suddenly I had this feeling, a premonition that I must get off the freeway right now. I told my wife I think we better get off the freeway right now, and she said,

" yeah yeah, I feel that too"

We got off the freeway and drove around looking for the National Park that was nearby, but we never saw the turnoff and we returned to the freeway. When we drove back to the freeway, we saw on the side of the road a fifty car pileup had occurred, police and ambulances were rushing to the scene. We quickly calculated that had we not gone off the road when we had, we would be right at the beginning of that pile-up and probably would not have survived it. We found out later that there were over 25 people who had died that day in one of the worst traffic accidents of the year. We both thought a guardian angel or something had saved us that day.