Even When You're Bad - True Guardian Angel Story

by Karen Marie Hart
(Ocala, Florida, USA)

True Guardian Angel Story submitted by Karen

I was twenty-one years old, and I was drunk behind the wheel of a car. When I realized I shouldn't be driving, I turned off the main highway and decided to take the back roads to my friend's apartment. The wise choice would've been to park the car on the shoulder, but I wasn't capable of that wise choice.

It was a very foggy night. My headlights didn't extend farther than ten feet. In a hairpin turn, I straightened the car out too soon, and drove straight off a cliff, as if I'd driven off a three story building.

I remember seeing the tree branches hitting the windshield and screaming.

Later, because I could never bring myself to see the car, my friend (who'd gathered my belongings from it when it was in the junk yard) told me the car sides had been pealed clean as if I'd driven tightly through two very large trees. The trees in fact were evergreens over a hundred feet tall.

I awoke sitting up straight in the passenger side seat of the car. Somehow I'd been removed from my seatbelt during my fall, when the driver's seat had been crushed into the steering wheel.

Somehow I knew that I was dying, and I thought, "Good. It's over now. All I have to do is sleep."

That's when an angel began to shake me, gripping my shoulders and shaking me fervently. I tried to remove their arms. I wanted them to let me be. But the angel began repeating, "Karen, you have to get out of the car."

At first I thought my friend, whom I'd been out with, shooting pool and drinking beer, was in the car. I tried to focus on her face. That's when I realized I couldn't see. I tried to call her name. I couldn't speak. Something was wrong with my lips, my mouth, and when I reached to touch my face, I could feel bone and my nose was missing.

I climbed out of the car and fell to the ground. The car was caught in low tree branches.

The angel took my arm and led me up a slippery slope, and through thick brush. I only climbed a few feet, yet when I returned to this place a year later, I would see that I had climbed over a hundred feet.

I had been carried.

I thought it was raining. I was soaked. My friend, who'd retrieved my belongings from the car, said the entire inside of the vehicle was showered in my blood. It had drenched my thick wool jacket, and my sweatshirt underneath.

Reaching the road, the angel said, "Go this way." Had I turned right, the next house was over thirty miles, and I would've bled to death on that old gravel road, alone, in the dark.

I couldn't see my hand in front of me. I don't know if it was the blood in my eyes, or the deep gash above my right eye - my better eye. My left eye is legally blind.

As I walked, the angel guided me, "Feel for the gravel." I was walking on the edge of that cliff, had I let my feet loose the feel of the gravel, I would've slipped down the muddy side.

It was over two miles when the angel guided me down a driveway, another half mile. But, I didn't walk these distances. Maybe a city block or two.

My eyes miraculously cleared as I approached the house. In answer to my knock, I witnessed shock on the woman's face, and looked down to my wet hands, and watched my blood pouring over them.
An ambulance took me to the nearest hospital, but they wouldn't work on me; they didn't have the staff for this kind of facial injury. I didn't understand all the commotion, or why they were carting me into another ambulance.

Miraculously, the next hospital had a visiting plastic surgeon: one of the top three in the country. The interior of my cheeks were sewn back to my skull, my face was stitched where my teeth had torn below my lower lip, and the gash over my right eyebrow was closed. (Over twenty years later, I still have to pencil in that eyebrow and even it out. It is higher than the left, so I have a subtle look of surprise- which is fitting for my story.)

Many months later, I would be able to have the surgery to reconstruct my nose.

I remember the doctors laughing at how amazing it was that I didn't break a tooth. My smile was protected.

My knee carries the scar from where they pulled the skin together to cover the exposed kneecap.

I was told by the doctors at the hospital that with my blood loss, serious internal bruising and concussion that I should never have woken up, let alone climb the cliff, walk to the house, and survive being transported from the first hospital to the city hospital another two hours away.

I tried to tell them I wasn't alone, and someone was keeping me alive, but I couldn't talk yet.

That night I learned that I was born on purpose; I wasn't an accident; I wasn't by nature bad, and the ones who'd taught it to me were just lost, like I'd gotten lost.

I am forty-four years old now, a professional artist, happily married and the mother of three. My artwork includes a small art store dedicated to inspiring others, and in it, of course, are angels. This is not a sales tool, I was simply inspired to share my story, but if you'd like to see some of the angels I paint, just copy and paste this link into your browser.

http://www.zazzle.com/angellights?rf=238952855395513222

My picture is there. What I have always seen in others, I see today in the mirror, not because of the surgery that repaired my face, but because God sent an angel to tell me so.


Thanks you for submitting your True Guardian Angel Stories
The team at
Angel-Guide.com