Tanya Ashworth/AZ

It Was 1969

It was 1969. The Vietnam Was was in progress. My boyfriend (my fiancé) was in boot camp and scheduled to leave for Vietnam. I made the decision that if Christ could stay up and pray all night in a garden, that I could do the same. Unfortunately, it was the middle of winter. I was in Wyoming and the temperatures, wind factor and snow made for bitterly cold conditions.

I went to a hill top at night to put in my prayer request. I was asking that my fiancé not have to go to war where he would be in danger. I prayed, and prayed and……it was no Garden of Gethsemane!! I was FREEZING! It was COLD! Even though I was being stubborn about it, I finally had to give up and go inside to continue the all night vigil.

Two weeks later my fiancé returned back home to prepare for his departure to Viet Nam. We had twenty days before he had to leave and I felt certain that God could provide a miracle to keep him home and out of danger.

Then… just out of the blue he came down with a debilitating pain in his chest, so severe that he had trouble breathing.

I was encouraged. You can’t possibly put someone with bad lungs on a plane and send them off to a damp high humidity jungle. Or so I thought.

He was diagnosed with pneumonia lodged in the chest bone, was given a shot in the bone and deployed on schedule.

I cried.

Then I received the love letters - lots of them. My fiancé, who was now my husband since we were married during his twenty day stay, was in the Engineering section of the Air Force. His job was to sit at a desk and prepare the paperwork for construction projects. He never saw the jungle. He never saw combat. He never even heard a shot.

The prayer was answered. Not quite in the way that I had in mind, but it was answered. I believe the pneumonia appearing out of nowhere was God’s way of showing me that He can manipulate circumstances if He chooses to but that in this case it was not what He had planned.

This is not a God Encounter in the sense of seeing or hear God but it was a direct God intervention.