Cop's Testimony: God Sent Angel as My Backup Officer

It’s so important in this day and age for us to talk about angel activity and share personal testimonies and eye-witness accounts from others about the working of angels. It stirs up a great expectation and opens the door for angels to work more and more in our lives.Angels don’t just show up to protect missionaries on the field or ministers traveling to preach the gospel.  Angels are on assignment by God to protect all of us whatever we’re called to do and wherever we’re doing it. In fact, this is a female police officer’s testimony of how an angel in uniform protected her from danger one night while on duty:“While on routine patrol one night on the midnight shift, I pulled up to a traffic light on a busy street with a drinking establishment on one corner. At the unction of the Holy Spirit, because God is a God who loves justice, I saw a car light come on in the parking lot. As soon as I saw those headlights come on, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Stop that car!’“Of course, in law enforcement you have to have probable cause to stop a car, so I was sort of watching the car and following it a ways. I took a right to get in behind this fellow driving a big, old Buick LeSabre. It was almost two decades ago now, but I remember it like it was yesterday.“After his car weaved left of center, I thought, Ah-ha, a drunk. He saw me in his rear view mirror and made a sharp left, but he didn’t use his turn signal. Ah-ha, failure to signal, I thought. There’s my probable cause.“Long story short, I pulled the car over and told communications over the radio that I was out on a vehicle stop. All of a sudden a big foot—and I mean enormous foot so much bigger than almost anyone’s—kicked open his car door and out came a massively huge guy. I’m only a little over five feet tall and almost everybody seems tall to me anyway.

“I thought, Dear God in heaven, I’ve just stopped the Brawny man with a twist of Grizzly Adams. He must have been 6’4” and had a lot of meat on him. The guy was massive.

“So as he’s climbing out of his car, I got on the radio and told communications, ‘Start me a backer.’ But eventually I had to get out of my car because I didn’t want Brawny-man coming back to me. I screamed at him to stick his hands out and turn around. When he did I saw a pistol in his waistband.“Yikes! I thought.“’Lord,’ I said out loud, ‘What have You gotten me into?’ I was serious because it was the Holy Spirit that told me to pull the guy over in the first place.“So I tell Brawny-man, ‘OK, now you’ve really got to keep your hands out to the side.’“As I walked up to him again, I said, ‘Headquarters, you’ve got to get me a backer started.’ But all I heard from the dispatcher was, ‘I’m trying.’“Suffice it to say, I got the gun away from Brawny-man and put it in the back of my waistband, but I still had to manage to handcuff him and search him again. So I got him down on his knees and even on his knees he was almost my height.“I stood there thinking, Holy cow, I’ve got to search this guy. Lord, how do I do this? So I got on the radio one more time and in my frustration said, ‘Headquarters, please, send me a backer!’

“To that Bozo the clown Brawny-man said, ‘What’s wrong with the one you’ve got?’ As he said this to me, his eyes were huge like 50-cent pieces.

“I don’t know where the words came from that fell out of my mouth next except that they came from my spirit. I didn’t plan them. I wasn’t thinking them because when I looked behind me, I was aware of nothing. But I heard myself say, ‘He’s a rookie, and he likes to fight.’“ Just hearing myself say that made me think, What?!“Brawny-man said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t mess with him.’

“About this time, I realized Brawny-man had to be seeing an angel that God sent to help me.

It’s probably a good idea that I didn’t see him because I really believe it would have distracted me, and I did have Brawny-guy there to deal with. I had to search him, and I pulled two more guns off this guy while I was trying to fit handcuffs on him. His wrists were like as big as my calves, and I had to squeeze and squeeze; finally they locked.“While I squeezed the handcuffs, Brawny-man started having a conversation with my backing officer—the angel. This is how the conversation went. Keep in mind that Brawny-man was in trouble, but he was not drunk. He did not get arrested for DUI. He got arrested for a felon in possession of firearms. As I ran his record, I found out the guy had a rap sheet as long as I was tall with arrests for firearms, homicides, sexual assaults, assaulting police officers and on and on and on.“As I finished patting the guy down, he looked over my shoulder and said to the angel that I could not see, ‘Boy, I know you didn’t walk into the uniform shop and pick that uniform off the shelf. You’re way too big. I know they don’t make them that big. Where did you get that uniform? Is that special made?’

“Then Brawny-man looked at me and said, ‘He doesn’t say much, does he?’

“To which I replied, ‘He doesn’t need to.’“Needless to say, I got him cuffed and up, and the guy was completely compliant.  I walked him over  to his car and leaned him over  it because I had to search his vehicle all by myself—but not. I pulled three more guns out of his car, and then I got a sawed-off shotgun  out of his trunk with about 220 rounds of ammunition. This guy was trouble.“But I’ll tell you this right now, as surely as the Lord lives, the uniform on the angel wasn’t for the benefit of Brawny-man; it was for me because I had been so frustrated at not getting a backer. I mean, Brawny-man was like 6’4,” and yet he looked up at my angel. The man’s eyes were huge as he looked at the angel, and whatever I wanted him to do, he did it.

He did it because the presence of God was with me in the form of that angel, and I realized that I have the only backer I will ever need.”

Angels Directing Traffic

In the early 1980s, an angel helped us on the highway. Traveling as itinerant ministers, we were on our way to the Wisconsin area where someone had offered to book the month of December for us. That was great news since December isn’t typically a good month for traveling ministers because most church calendars are busy with Christmas activities. So back then if we were offered a December meeting, it didn’t matter where it was, we quickly accepted the invitation.A person had contacted us and said, “If you’ll come to Wisconsin, we’ll set up two solid weeks of meetings for you all in one location.” Unfortunately, they had to call back and explain they ran into some problems. Long story short, the whole schedule fell apart. “But I’ve re-booked you,” the person said. “You still have a full schedule.”The interesting part was that when we got to Wisconsin, we realized the meetings had been scheduled back and forth across the state. A meeting was on one side of the state one night and clear across the state the next night. Then the next night we were back to the other side and then back again. In other words, we were routed all over the state of Wisconsin crisscrossing back and forth.Let’s just say we did not have an ideal itinerary, and we did not have ideal driving conditions either. There’s a lot of desolate territory up there once you get out of the cities. It was also really, really cold—record cold. With the wind chill factored in, it was something like 60 degrees below zero.This was a big surprise to my lovely wife from Louisiana. When she said her wedding vows she repeated, “Withersoever thou goest, I’ll go. Thy God shall be my God.” But back then, she had no idea what she was getting herself into when she married me. When we walked outside that December, she said, “Oh! My nose hairs have frozen!” I had a mustache at the time that seemed to turn into a big icicle in under 10 minutes flat. No joke. It was cold. We would drive our car an hour or two, but still not have any heat. I mean it was cold.We prayed for divine protection as we drove across the state night after night in the dark. You could drive for miles and not see a light, not see a house, not see anything. I believe sometimes God covers for us when we don’t use a lot of smarts ourselves or when there are no  options. Still, we didn’t worry about how dangerous it would be if our car broke down; we just thanked God for divine protection.I still remember the night we were on a two-lane back road hurrying to the other side of the state, and God mightily protected us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a deer running out of the woods headed straight for us. It would have meant a major crash. Then amazingly, the deer ran to the side of the road and began spinning in circles. We drove right by the deer going round and round and round in circles.

Can you just imagine a couple of big angels twirling that deer to keep him from smashing into our car?

That poor deer probably wondered what in the world he just ran into when he met up with our angels. God’s angels were on the scene working to keep us safe.

Angels on the Mission Field

On my first overseas missions trip in 1978, an angel came to help us once again. I traveled with another minister to Kenya, South Africa, and we were covering two countries in just a few weeks. So we had flown from Tulsa to New York, caught another flight in New York to London and arrived in the morning with a seven-hour time difference. We spent the first day in London sightseeing and then returned to the airport to catch a night flight to Nairobi. By the time we got into Nairobi, we hadn’t slept in about two days.We were in for a surprise because for some reason we had thought we were traveling to a major city. But we got off the plane and were greeted by two Kenyan ministers carrying a sign with our name on it. After fellowshipping with the ministers for a few minutes we asked, “Are we going to our hotel now?”“No,” the Kenyan ministers said, “Now we take you over to the taxi stand. We put you in a taxi (more of a van), and you go six hours on a trip through the Rift Valley to a place called Kisumu.”“Really? ” we asked. “We’ve got six or seven more hours through the Rift Valley?”It was a gorgeous place with giraffes running across the terrain. But after two days without sleep, we were almost too tired to see anything, so we asked, “Is there any other way to get there?”“There’s another small airport here, and they have small planes. We could probably get somebody to fly you over there,” they said.“Let’s go find out,” we said.So they put us in a car, took us to this other private airport and found an Australian bush pilot with a single-engine four-seat plane.“Can you fly us to Kisumu?” we asked him. “Sure,” he said.We figured out the price, paid him, and filled the plane with luggage so there was barely enough room for the two of us to sit with the pilot. Even then, the Kenyan ministers took about half the luggage down to the taxi stand and strapped it to the top of a vehicle. We were novices at traveling at that point, and clearly we had way too much luggage.

Sitting in the back seat of the plane with suitcases piled next to me, I was reminded of the Gilligan’s Island S.S. Minnow with its three-hour tour.

But at least we were airborne and on our way, so I lay back and slept soundly. All of a sudden, I felt the plane bank sharply to the right, and I woke right up.“What’s going on?” I asked.“There’s a storm over at the Kisumu airport,” the pilot said. “I can’t land there.”He didn’t say anything else so I fell back to sleep. We flew a little while longer when suddenly we were descending in the middle of a field surrounded by trees and woods. There was no airport, no tarmac, no luggage carousels. Still, right in the middle of these desolate surroundings, the plane landed, and the pilot turned off the engine.Before we knew it, the pilot hauled the suitcases out of the plane to the side of the road, which really was more of a path with a couple of ruts. He lined up the suitcases saying, “It’s getting dark, and that storm is coming this direction. I’ve got to get out of here!”“I’ll tell you what,” he added. “You guys hitchhike on that road into Kericho. Have the guy take you to the Tea Hotel. When you get there, you can get a taxi to take you to Kisumu. Gotta go. See ya. Bye.”

Minutes later, the pilot had fired up the plane and headed off into the sunset. The other minister and I had no idea where we were; we didn’t even know for sure we were still in Africa.

The pilot got his money, and he was off. We didn’t have a clue where we were, and he didn’t tell us.We decided to walk toward the road, which was great except there were no cars. Finally we saw a mini pick up truck coming with a shell on the back of it, but the guy drove way around us and kept driving. Dark clouds were forming, and the storm was coming closer. It was not a pretty picture.Finally another little vehicle came by, and we held up our thumbs, but that driver only sped up and raced around us. By then the sky was really dark, and things were looking even worse. We looked at each other and said, “We probably ought to get in faith over this.” So we said, “Lord, we really need a ride to Kericho, wherever Kericho is. Thank You, Lord, for a ride.” Still we could see no more vehicles on the road.

All of a sudden, a man came walking out of the woods who appeared to be a Kenyan. He walked directly up to us and said in perfect English, “May I help you?”

Yeah, I think so.“We need to get to Kericho. Do you know where that is?” we asked. “Yes,” he said.“We need a ride.” “OK,” he said.About that time another vehicle comes down the road. The Kenyan from the woods didn’t give the thumb sign like we had. He just stepped out into the middle of the road, and sure enough, the driver pulled over and talked to our friend from the woods.He came back and said, “He will take you to the Tea Hotel in Kericho for such and such amount of money.” It wasn’t much at all.“Great!” we said as we counted out the money and climbed into the back of a truck with four or five Kenyan guys. The guy from the woods took our suitcases and tied them on top of the truck, and we were ready to roll.

As we sat down, he just waved and walked back into the woods.

“Thank you!” I hollered.About an hour later, we ended up at the Tea Hotel in Kericho and began the last leg of our journey by taxi to Kisumu. Eventually, we arrived at our hotel in Kisumu and met our contact, Brother Silas Owete. He was a wonderful man who warmly greeted us in the hotel foyer, asking, “My brothers, my brothers, where have you been?”We told him what happened.

The more we talked the bigger his eyes got. “Oh, my brothers we have a miracle!” he said. “Oh, we have a miracle!”

“We have?” we asked.“Oh, yes,” he said. “You must understand the place where you were dropped off is filled with people who normally would kill you and take your luggage. It’s not a good place to be, my brothers. There are visitors who go there every now and then, but they are never seen again. Normally, we would have found your goods all over the countryside. It’s a miracle, my brothers, a miracle!”Right then I was saying, “Dear Jesus, thank You for divine protection.” We were in a potentially very dangerous place, and we didn’t even know it. And yet, I believe the Kenyan man who came out of the woods was an angel of God. I’m convinced that he was sent to deliver us, and he probably saved our lives. I’m sure I’ve met that guy in different forms all over the world because we’ve had God help us in so many places. 

Angel on Guard in the Train Tunnel

I’m so glad that angels are not limited by passports or airfares or countries or locations. Two young women from our church traveled to Mongolia on a missionary journey a few years back and were grateful for an angel who protected them in a train tunnel.One of the young women shared her testimony with our church. She prefaced her testimony by explaining that she had learned first-hand that when two young women travel to a foreign country and don’t know anyone or the language, the stage is set for adventure.She said they witnessed for themselves that the environment in Mongolia seemed “raw” by some standards and that in many instances visitors to the country were often robbed.  “There were stories  that natives would put their hands in purses or try to grab visitors,” she said. “We heard reports of taxis taking people places they didn’t want to go and reports of people wandering the streets in violence and desperation.”The young woman explained that on this particular trip the two of them were taking a train to another city near the Russian border, but couldn’t figure out how to make their connections. “We showed our ticket to people and did lots of pointing; missions work can be a lot like charades sometimes,” she said. “We finally realized we were totally in the wrong area on the wrong side of the tracks. To get to the other side, we had to take a tunnel underneath the train tracks.”The young woman continued her story: “Loaded up with our heavy backpacks on our backs, we headed down the stairs."

"It was really dark and dreary down there and pretty desolate. The only person we saw was a big man in the shadows leaning against a back wall.

“The minute he saw us, he began walking toward us. Immediately, we knew his intentions weren’t good, so we locked arms and braced ourselves. We were carrying 50-pound backpacks, and we couldn’t have run even if we had wanted to run.”“‘What do we do? What do we do?’ we began whispering to one another.“The really troubling part was that if we moved to one side, he also moved to one side. If we shifted the other way, he did too. He was heading straight for us without stopping. Finally, he got to within about six inches of our faces and stopped like he hit a brick wall. The man got a really strange look on his face and began looking two or three feet above our heads."“His eyes still focused way above our heads like he was looking up at somebody, he said in perfect English, ‘Oh, excuse me. I am sorry.’ Then he simply walked away.“Shocked, we immediately turned around to see what tall person behind us could possibly have frightened the guy off. We saw no one. Then it dawned on us, ‘Angels!’"

We realized an angel had come to our rescue and was more than enough to send the guy with bad intentions packing!

God was protecting us even when we didn’t know what was going on!”

Angel Offers Roadside Assistance

I heard another testimony recently about a young woman who drove through a city and got lost. She ended up in an area where she really shouldn’t have been, a really rough part of town known for crime and violence. Worse yet, her car broke down and just stopped. She was really afraid because she recognized it was no place for a young woman to be alone.But seemingly out of the blue, a very nice car pulled up behind her and a well-dressed man in a business suit got out and said, “You’re in the wrong place!”“That’s for sure!” she said.He gave her directions. Then he raised the hood of the car, did a little something, and the car instantly started. Before she knew it, he closed the hood of her car and got back in his car. She looked back to say thank you and wave at him.

But both the man and his car had totally disappeared. How’s that for supernatural, angelic road-side service?

Angels can and will do all kinds of amazing things to take care of us.Every one of us should be aware of divine service roadside and every other side. Our angels are all around us on assignment. Your angel is no scrawny little guy; he’s big and strong. Your angel has been around forever, he’s well-seasoned, well trained, and ready to show up whenever needed.