Marriage, Divorce & Renewal, Part III

Unable to find a remedy, I let go of the steering wheel — both hands. I grabbed the door handle with my left hand and the safety belt clasp with my right. I had every intent of jumping. A nanosecond of doubt flashed a vision of me slipping when I jumped and the truck rolling over me. As it turns out, that’s exactly what would have happened.

I better make the jump a good one. Literally, as muscles flexed to execute my escape, miraculously the truck turned away from the edge of disaster and back toward the road. I grabbed the wheel with both hands, steered back on the road at maybe 5 MPH with barely 30 pounds of air pressure left. Although I did not meet death, thankfully, I still had no solution. From the frying pan into the fire and back into the frying pan. Ugh!

Almost instinctively I reached for the start button. VROOM. That Cummins 400 diesel fired up. My heart leapt. My eyes jumped to the air gauge. YES! She was climbing.

I revved the motor and grabbed a gear. With torque-braking from the transmission, I was able to creep downhill as air pressure continued to build.

That’s when my knees turned to jelly. And about one second later, I heard it. Time seemed to stop. Momentarily, I was in another place. That’s when I heard it. It was audible: “Norman, go home.”

So startlingly real was the voice that I reactively looked to the passenger seat to see who got in the truck with me. But I was alone. No one went with me to Farmington, and no one came back with me. No human anyway.

But as sure as I am writing in this moment, I heard it: “Norman, go home.”

One preacher described the voice of God, saying, “It was not an audible voice. It was louder than that.” I think I know what he meant. But as for me, I am convinced there were sound waves in that truck. No one had ever spoken any more clearly to me than that voice on that day.

Through the years as I have shared this miracle, some listeners have looked skeptically at me. While I realize I have claimed that the God who said, “Let there be light” spoke to me, I say it with as much or more amazement as those who hear that claim. I get that. But, it’s true.

One man, a Baptist, told me that, although God had spoken audibly to people in the Bible, he no longer spoke audibly to anyone anymore.

“So, Jim, you don’t believe God speaks anymore?” I asked.

“Not like that,” Jim replied.

“Well, then, I am convinced of two things,” I said.

“Yeah, what are they?

“Number one, as a mere human you cannot put God in such a box. And two, if that’s the box to which you have relegated God, then surely he will never speak to you.”

End of that conversation.

“Norman, go home.” I can still hear it. It was not deeply thunderous; it was calmly authoritative. Not stern but firm. I knew God had little-to-no patience left for me because I had heard that warning a few times before in the far reaches of the conscience I consistently squelched. Despite knowing the speaker, I found it easy to ignore his words. Instead of obeying, I had defied God. On this day, I knew I dare not do that again.

 “Norman, go home” meant “put your marriage back together” because my home was with Cynthia and our two children.

Mere weeks after my rescue from the Wolf, the oil boom finally went bust as did my job. So, I went home to my parents’ house about 25 miles from where Cynthia and our children lived. Through that summer I had some contact with them, but I was still reluctant about the whole matter of “go home.” I couldn’t just jump back into their lives, and I really didn’t want to at that point.

I was dealing with some deep struggles then that seemed to prohibit any sort of emotional growth in a filial way. I had to get re-acquainted with God. Besides, I had no desire to re-marry. NOT. AT. ALL.

Norm Miller can be contacted at nmiller@montanacc.edu