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My mother's only brother died in March, 1983, in a car/train accident. I was devastated. Uncle Bud was like a father, a brother, and a best friend to me. He had visited my family and me in Nashville only the week before. It was a sad drive I made back to Kansas, and an even sadder funeral.

That night, I sat with my mother as she entered Uncle Bud's name in the birth/death section of the old family Bible. As we read the names, we were suddenly startled by something we'd never noticed before. The number 11 was all over the page -- literally. Numerous relatives had been born on or had died on the eleventh day of any given month. My mother's birth date was September 11, my son's January 11. A surprising number had been born in November, the eleventh month of the year. A number of them, including my father, had been born in 1911.

We also noted a preponderance of 22s, a multiple of 11. My father, for instance, was born on September 22. His mother had died on June 22.

While my mother was intrigued by this phenomenon, I was emotionally shaken. When I went to bed later that evening, my mind was whirling with fresh memories of similar occurrences from the trip I had just taken to Kansas two days before. I had traveled only a few miles from Nashville when I began to notice 11 popping up frequently enough to catch my attention.

Once or twice when I had stopped at a service station to fill up with gas, the amount of purchase had contained an 11. As I recall, one time the amount was actually $11.11. The pump had stopped at that amount when the tank was full.

As I drove I would occasionally look at my watch or the clock above the radio. Eerily, the time frequently would be eleven minutes before or after the hour. When I stopped at a motel for the night, the desk clerk handed me the room key and said, "Have a restful sleep. You're in Room 11."

In the coming months, I found all of this to be enormously comforting as the marvel continued, though not as frequently. When it did happen, I felt a warmth, a closeness to Bud, and an assurance that he was just fine on The Other Side. I don't know what the significance of 11 is, or how it fits into my spiritual journey as one who is trying to follow Jesus. A numerologist has told me that 11 is, in her words, "a very high spiritual number." I don't know what she means. But I do believe that the God Jesus came to tell us about loves us so much that he/she will use anything to reassure us that all is well in ways we can't see in this lifetime. If the repetition of a numeral is what it takes to get my attention, then that's the tool God will use.

Weeks later, after Uncle Bud's funeral, I went back to visit his gravesite. I had to laugh out loud. I shook my head in amazement as I noted that on every grave marker adjacent to his resting place, there appears the number 11.

Thanks be to God for signs and wonders that comfort, assure, and encourage us.

Bill Hoglund


Back in the days of my hospital chaplaincy, assigned to what was then a newly-opened retirement center connected to the hospital by a tunnel, I felt I always had the best of both worlds in my ministry. When I needed to "decompress" after some tough situation at the hospital, there were always the appreciative seniors at the retirement center, where my "boss," himself a retired clergyman, had carved an office for me out of what was originally intended to be a janitor's storage closet.

Charlie and Doris were an older couple in the building who had come from New Jersey. A native Midwesterner, I always got a kick out of their thick Jersey accents. I appreciated them both, but Charlie loved to regale me with golf stories from his career in sales. Many a deal was consummated on the course, and he must have been a pretty fair golfer in his day.

Quite some time later, when I heard things had gone bad for him after a stay in the hospital with pneumonia, I hurried up to the Intensive Care Unit to be with him and his wife. We shared precious moments and prayers before he gently passed on to what he'd once referred to hopefully as his ultimate "promotion."

Getting into the '67 Chevy Impala I drove, later on that cool, crisp night, I noticed the clock of my battered ol' beater had stopped at 8:28. I didn't give it a second thought since the clock and everything else in the car seemed to have a mind of its own. But the next morning, before her children gathered around her from different parts of the country, I received a phone call from Doris. "Reverend Bill, I know Charlie's okay. I just know it," she said calmly and without tears. "You see, the clock above our kitchen table stopped last night. That clock was a wedding present and it has traveled all over the country with us. It stopped at exactly the same time the doctor said he 'officially' passed away, 8:28 p.m."

You cannot tell me that this was a coincidence, for "Christ has prepared a place for us" (John 3). Doris and I know Charlie's there, peacefully "promoted," maybe "wheeling and dealing" with the saints on some celestial golf course!

Britney-Lee Joy Hessel

One Saturday, I was babysitting. My sister Shawna was playing in her room, and I was sitting with my back against the wall and a blanket pulled up to my shoulders. I was really sleepy. The first time I nodded off, something that felt like a large hand pushed my left cheek gently, but hard enough to wake me up. I looked at Shawna, but she wasn't even close to me. The same thing happened two more times.

After the third time, I asked Shawna if she touched me, and she said no. I was a little freaked out! I realized that God was keeping me awake so that I wouldn't get in trouble. He knew that I couldn't really take care of my sister if I was asleep. I had been praying that God would help me, my brother, and my sister stay out of trouble. It's really great to know that he is there for me, and everybody else in the world.

Debra Partridge

After my father passed away, I inherited the daily diaries that my mother had kept from the time I was three years old. It was totally amazing to me that she found time to write in a diary, since she worked full time and raised six kids. I learned so much about her and our family from reading them.

When my grandfather, James Archie Sumwalt, was sick in March of 1961, Mother wrote, "Dad is not good." On March 7, she wrote that Grandpa was worse. My father, James Allen Sumwalt, got the call from Grandma later that day that he was gone.

That night, my dad drove over sixty miles, from Madison to Richland Center in southwest Wisconsin, in a blinding blizzard. Mother didn't want him to go alone, but he was determined to be with his family. She wrote in her diary that Dad's trip to Richland Center was pretty scary. Visibility was so bad that the only way he could tell if he was on the road was to keep the car door open. Thank God that he made it. He also drove home the next day to help mother get six children packed and ready to go back for the funeral. I don't remember much from that time, but I do remember how confused I felt when I saw my daddy, the big man in my life, break down in tears.

Life went on and time went by, and then one day it happened all over again.

My father became ill around Thanksgiving time in 1992. In December, they found an aneurysm on the back side of an artery to his heart. Surgery was successful, but during his recovery the doctors discovered cancer in his kidneys, one totally gone and the other almost. He got better for a little while, and then in January he just got down and could never get back up.

Dad was living in Florida, where he and Mother had retired after leaving Wisconsin. We were living in Alabama, and my husband and I would travel every weekend to visit with Dad in the hospital. It was very hard to see him so sick. He was able to hang on until he saw each of his six children one last time. My brother Dan, from Wisconsin, made it down on the third of March. Dad lost the battle with cancer on March 7, 1993, 32 years to the day after his father's death.

My parents wished to be buried in Madison, so arrangements were made and Dad's body was sent "home" to Wisconsin to be buried next to Mother. My sister, Diane, and her daughter drove to my home in Alabama and we all drove together to Wisconsin. We drove eighteen hours through a blinding blizzard. In Illinois, visibility was almost zero. We didn't even know when we crossed into Wisconsin. But when it got too bad, my husband said, "We have to pull off at the next exit no matter where it is." We were able to see a bright light off the side of the road and he said, "That's where we will go." When we took the exit off the highway, we were amazed to discover that it was exactly the exit we needed to get to Madison.

I have always believed that guardian angels gave us the light to find our way through the storm that night, just as they helped my father find his way when his father died so many years ago.