Read Online Christmas Miracles by Brad Steiger - Free Book Online Page A

offered her encouragement. “Go for it, Dad.”
    â€œEasy now,” he said, “I’m going very easy. Keep watching the edge, honey.”
    Melissa’s face was numb from the cold and the sleet, but she kept looking out the window.
    â€œThat’s when I saw directly behind us and just above us a brilliant white light with a bluish center,” she recalled. “I don’t know where it had come from. It hadn’t been there moments before—and then there it was. It was strangely beautiful, and it appeared to move higher, then lower, as if it were somehow intelligently surveying our dilemma.
    â€œI didn’t hear a voice,” Melissa said, “but I knew that I was receiving a message from the light that told me not to worry, that Dad and I would be all right. Somehow that light and I were connected in some mysterious and glorious way.”
    Melissa’s father released the brake and gently pressed on the accelerator—but to his alarm, the car began sliding backward.
    â€œMelissa, I can’t control the car,” he said, unable to keep the panic from his voice. “I’m sorry. We’re sliding backward. Hold on, honey, we could go in the ditch and tip over. Be sure your seatbelt is buckled!”
    She tried to calm her father, to tell him not to be frightened. She knew that somehow the mysterious light was in control and that they would not be harmed.
    The car went backward all the way to the base of the hill, and Melissa saw the light spin off into a clump of trees, then either disappear or blink out in the darkness.
    â€œWe hadn’t sat there very long when a highway patrol car pulled alongside of us,” Melissa said. “The officers told us that we shouldn’t try to travel up the hill. The old covered bridge had collapsed and passage would be impossible. There was nothing left up there but some broken and rotted planks and a long drop into the river. Up ahead, though, they said, was a road that would lead us back to the main highway where crews had already applied salt and sand to the slickest places.”
    The remainder of the drive back home was uneventful. Melissa’s father praised her for being so helpful, for keeping an eye on the edge of the road, and for paying no mind to the cold and sleet that he knew had to be stinging her face.
    â€œI had truly bonded with my father that Christmas Day,” Melissa said, “but I had also bonded with something incredibly mysterious that represented a source of strength outside of myself that has returned time and again in my memory to give me courage during some very dark moments.
    â€œI don’t know if that light was an angel or an unknown intelligence of some kind. And I don’t know why I felt so much a part of it. All I know for certain is that whatever it was, it became the Christmas miracle that probably saved my dad and me from injury or worse during that sleet storm.”

D ave Bennett was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 lung and bone cancer. The cancer in his spinal column has already gnawed away at the top three discs. This kind of deterioration causes excruciating pain—add to that difficulty breathing, nausea, weakness, and debilitating tiredness from intensive chemotherapy treatments and radiation, and it becomes difficult to feel much other than agony and despair. The doctors are unable to tell Dave just how long he might expect to live. He and his wife, Cindy, are looking at an optimistic ten-year plan, yet are getting his affairs in order. That tells you something about them.
    Cindy said they have had a deluge of well-meaning people offering suggestions for various techniques to try to recover. “Suggestions range from jumping up and down on a trampoline to drinking a healing Essiac Tea and all kinds of things in between,” she shared. Confirming Dave would definitely not be trying the trampoline cure, she added that he does have a strong personal