God's Hand in the Wind - Gladys' Testimony

Gladys and the intruder

(Gladys' testimony - a 7-minute audio clip. Click Play to listen)

You could hardly find anyone as excitable as Gladys, but almost always on a positive note - happy and joyful.  All the more so when she’s telling you what the Lord has done for her. It is as if her petite frame could not contain all the joy and excitement, so she must let it out. I don’t know why she always has good testimonies to tell, almost make me jealous! And this is a very good one.

We rarely have strong wind in this part of the country (Ipoh, Malaysia), but it was an exception on April 20, 2011. A colleague of mine told me that while he was driving through the heavy rain suddenly a tree branch, broken and carried by the powerful wind, hit his windscreen and most shocked the life out of him. He couldn’t see far enough to drive safely so he parked his car at the side of the road until the visibility in the rain was good enough to continue. The next day I personally counted some ten spots around town where either a tree or a road sign or a billboard was broken or collapsed, and this only on the routes that I took. 

Well, back to Gladys. She reached home at about 3pm after ministering to a friend for about four hours telling her about divine healing. Happy and convinced that she had been used by the Lord to broker His Kingdom into the circumstances of a sister; she went up to her room, opened a song book and began to worship in songs. The wind was howling outside but she couldn’t care less. She felt so much in another world basking in the presence of the Lord that the present reality around her didn’t seem so real. Then, a thud, “like the sound of a pencil snapped” according to her words, slightly jolted her. It came from outside the house, so she went to the window to have a look. From her position she could see one large stretch of a tree trunk lying on the road at the side of her house. So it was not a pencil that snapped, but a tree! To be exact, a fifty-feet tall casuarina tree.

When she came to the scene, any illusion was instantly dispelled and she was given a good dose of the reality. It was more than one broken stretch of tree trunk lying on the road, as she initially made out from the limited view upstairs. One large piece some eight feet long fell into her garden after hitting the side fencing wall (Gladys’ house is a corner lot at the end of a block of linked-houses), overlying and damaging her bunga kantan plant and with its tip dipping inside the apron drain. It missed her brand new car parked under the porch by less than three feet! And most fortunately it just missed the side-terrace roof, the eave of which lies in a vertical line above the apron drain. This was all Gladys saw by the time she checked-in to the scene. If she had not fully woke up to reality by then she had the help of astonished and terrified neigbours joining her for investigation. A handful of them rushed to the scene after hearing a big bang thinking something real bad had happened. To them it certainly didn’t sound like “a pencil snapped”! They were thinking there must have been considerable damage done to the house given the impact evidenced by the big bang, but seeing relatively minor damage they sought an account from the house owner. All they could get out of Gladys was “Halleluiah! My God is so good! My Jesus is so good!”

Tree trunk overlying bunga kantan plant with its tip inside the drain

You could see the tree concerned in the photo below. It stood across the road from Gladys’ house. Its top portion was snapped off by the mighty gusts of wind and the stretch must have broken on landing. Altogether three lengths of trunk were found, two lying on the road and one in Gladys’ house, making up some twenty feet in total length. That means the tree must have been some fifty feet tall originally, given the substantial length left standing. Given the height from which it fell, coupled with increased velocity due to the strong wind, the trunk could have seriously damaged the roof if it hit it. I said “fortunately” it didn’t, but actually I believe it couldn’t because the Lord’s hand was on Gladys and her property. She wasted no time praising and boasting about God’s protection and His power in front of her neighbours who were non-believers. It was a wonderful testimony.    

Gladys told me afterwards that to her the amazing thing is that throughout the incident she was not alarmed at all. It was as if she was in another world where there is no storm, only Shalom peace. I think it’s like this:  through worship she had pulled the reality of the Kingdom of God into the physical world around her. It was awesome! 

When she related the incident to me on the phone, I immediately thought of a favorite verse:

     

You, O Lord, are my refuge!

You have made the Most High your home.

No harm will come to you.

No sickness will come near your house. (Ps 91: 9-10, GWD)

Outrageous, huh? Believe it and you will have it.