You ever read any of those stories about people who swear they nearly died and went to heaven? Then they were resuscitated and survived and came back to tell the whole world about their experiences? Apparently Christians are kind of divided when it comes to stories like that. I guess some people think it’s all hocus-pocus, maybe even the work of demons (although I really can’t understand why a demon would try to convince someone they were in heaven, but that’s neither here nor there). Other folks get all into it, write their bestselling books, earn their millions.
I honestly don’t know where I fall on that spectrum. I’ve already told you that I’ve only been a Christian for a couple of weeks. Seriously, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with myself on a Friday night now that I’m not allowed to go out and party, so I’m probably not the best person to ask about convoluted matters of faith and theology.
All I can tell you is what happened to me.
And that’s basically the reason I’m saved now.
I was stuck. I couldn’t move. I don’t know if was my injuries from getting stepped on or what. Maybe it was even a literal demon holding me in place, trying to kill me before I had the chance to turn my life around. I seriously don’t know.
But I couldn’t move. Each time I budged, something caught around my neck. Like something was trying to strangle me.
I was going to die.
And do you know what I thought about? Well it certainly wasn’t tapas. Or Mr. Math Babe. Or how terrible Kennedy would feel once I was dead.
I thought about my family. Wondered if they were following the news already or if they were blissfully waiting for their only child to come home, never suspecting the life was seeping out of my pores with every second.
But more than anything? I thought about that little old lady. Grandma Lucy. The one who stood ready to take a bullet for me.
There are people I’d probably die for. My parents, for one thing. Maybe even Kennedy if it ever came right down to it. Underage victims of human trafficking? I’d be willing to risk my life if I knew it could save them.
But this little old lady stood up for me. Told that deranged General she would take my place.
I suppose if you were looking in from the outside, maybe you’d think it made evolutionary sense, in that cold, calculated Darwinian way. Grandma Lucy was old. Had lived her life. Had passed on her genes, blah, blah, blah. And here I was. Young. Healthy. Strong.
So she was willing to trade places.
But there was more to it than that. I wish I could explain to you what I heard in her voice. Wish I could describe the intensity. You ever watch those superhero movies? There’s a common trope in a lot of them. This old lady with wicked awesome supernatural powers. The kind who can heal you with a touch or strike fear into villains five times their size.
That’s the kind of power I sensed in Grandma Lucy when she stood between me and that gunman. An unmistakable, never before experienced power.
I was agnostic basically my entire life, but I always believed in something divine. Something beyond what science can explain or the eye can see. But I’d never experienced it until that moment. And do you know what it was I felt pouring out of Grandma Lucy?
Love.
She loved me.
Not in the way some do-good Mother Theresa-esque kind of saint would feel warm and fuzzy toward all humanity. This was far more personal.
Far more powerful.
Grandma Lucy loved me. Enough to die in my place, even though she didn’t even know me. Some people look at my dyed hair, my couple extra body piercings, and they write me off as some kind of edgy weirdo. Once at the bookstore I even had a mom tell her child, “Don’t make eye contact with her.” So yeah. I may not be part of a marginalized minority in any real sense of the word, but I certainly have experienced my share of prejudice. Of being written off as “other.”
But Grandma Lucy saw past all that. It was like she was seeing the real me.
Me, Willow Winters. A scared young woman who only wanted to get home to her mom and dad.
And she was willing to die in my place.
She’d already saved my life once. I knew that much. I can’t recall a single word she said in her prayer while she was staring at that gun, ready to take that bullet meant for me, but I can tell you the power I felt behind her words.
In another culture, another religious era, she might have been called a shaman. A spiritual healer. A miracle woman.
Instead, she was just Grandma Lucy. The most powerful woman I’ve ever encountered.
Thinking about her gave me hope, and that’s all I had to cling to as I lay on that cabin floor, smoke burning my lungs, stinging my eyes, draining the life out of me. Grandma Lucy loved me enough to save me.
And she hadn’t done that so I could die here alone.