It was a hot summer morning. Hermano Pablo (missionary Paul Finkenbinder) and four other Christian ministers climbed into Pablo’s ancient Chevrolet to travel through the foothills of El Salvador. For several days, they’d been conducting revival meetings out in the country; now they were headed for San Salvador, the capital city.
The trip over the narrow, twisting roads was hazardous even under good weather conditions. But conditions that morning were far from good. Summer is the rainy season in El Salvador, and in many places the dirt road had already turned to mud. Worse, none of the five men in the car knew this region. They did not know that about 150 miles ahead of them, around a deceptive curve, lay the tracks of a railroad.
The same morning, many miles away in the city of Santa Ana, an Indian housemaid was having trouble settling down to work. Angela Mancia kept stopping in the middle of her chores.
Angela worked for a missionary couple, Ralph and Jewel Williams. She knew Hermano Pablo well—he always stayed with the Williamses when he was in Santa Ana—and Angela often prayed for him and his work. But she was not thinking about him that morning. Indeed, she was aware only of a vague uneasiness, a mounting sense of fear.
Hermano Pablo was driving with one eye on the thunderclouds massing in the east. His friends—Israel Garcia beside him in the front seat, Juan, José, and Fernando in the back—watched the approaching storm as they talked.
About eleven o’clock, the tropical storm reached them, the rain lashing the windshield faster than the wipers could sweep it clean. Pablo leaned forward, straining to see ahead.
Angela was struggling with unaccountable tears when Jewel Williams walked into the kitchen. “Angela! What on earth’s the matter?”
“I don’t know, señora,” Angela insisted. “Except . . .” and all at once she was sure of something. “Someone’s in trouble! I know it! Do you think . . . do you think I should go to the church and pray?”
“Of course!”
So Angela started up the muddy street to the little church where she and the Williams family worshiped.
Ordinarily, it took about ten minutes to climb the hill. But that morning it took Angela half an hour because she stopped to talk to every Christian friend she met. To each she described the strange uneasiness, the growing sureness that God was telling her to pray for someone.
“Won’t you come with me?” she asked each one. Half a dozen women agreed. And so it was that morning that a handful of Indian Christians walked through the door of the little Assembly of God church, sat down, and began to pray without knowing what it was they were praying about.
At about one o’clock, the five ministers stopped for lunch. The rain continued. Outside, the road was growing more slippery every minute. They climbed back into the old car and went on.
In Santa Ana, the pendulum clock on the wall of the church read 1:30. The women prayed without stopping to eat, unaware of hunger, unaware of anything except the urgency that now gripped them all. “Lord, somewhere one of your children is in trouble. You know who it is, Lord Jesus. Put your hand where the need is.”
It was like driving inside a drum, Pablo thought—with the rain hammering on the roof. It was nearly as dark as the inside of a drum too, although it was only two in the afternoon. Pablo decided to stop until the storm was over. But where? Up ahead he made out a curve. Just beyond it, perhaps, there’d be a place to pull over.
“Help your child, Lord, wherever he is!”
“Look out!” Israel Garcia cried.
The headlight of a train shone through the storm, coming fast. Pablo jerked the wheel and slammed on the brakes, but the car kept sliding over the slick mud.
They heard the frantic scream of the whistle. Then the locomotive hit them. The car spun around, and the train hit it again. The right-hand door flew open; Garcia was hurled out. The car rose into the air, came down on its top, and turned over.
“Help him, Lord!”
Pablo opened his eyes. He was lying on the ground, and the rain had stopped. Beside him was a tangle of metal that only gradually he recognized as his Chevy.
Now he realized that he was delirious, because it seemed to him that a crowd of people was standing around him and that among them were his four friends—all alive and all talking to a policeman, who was making notes in a little book. The engineer of the train was there too, staring at them.
“The time?” the policeman was asking him.
The engineer drew a watch from his pocket, still staring at the four. In the voice of one dazed, he replied, “It’s two thirty.” Slowly, shakily, Pablo got to his feet. “It’s not possible,” the engineer began. Pablo was embracing his friends. At the policeman’s orders, they started for the ambulance, walking away from the circle of gaping passengers, away from the still-throbbing locomotive, away from the sound of the engineer’s voice saying, “How can it be? No one could have walked out of that car! It isn’t possible!”
Far away in Santa Ana, the long prayer vigil was over. A sudden silence fell over the church. Angela opened her eyes and looked around. The haunting feeling was gone. The other women felt it too. They knew that whatever they had been called to do was now finished.
Angela’s voice was a little tired as she spoke. Almost in a whisper, she suggested they sing a hymn of praise and thanksgiving. “I’d like to sing ‘How Great Thou Art,’” she said—and then for the first time, she remembered the work waiting for her back at the house.
Angela glanced at the pendulum clock and was astonished to see how late it was. The clock’s hands stood at 2:30.