The Saving Hand

from Grandma Stories: God’s Little Miracles by LDMahan

 (This story was told to me by my father, Melvin Adrian)
 

When I was a boy in Southern Ohio, my brothers and I often liked to go swimming.  In those days there was no air conditioning, so the only way to cool off in summer was in front of a fan or by getting wet.  It was much more fun to get wet!   

There were also no swimming pools in those days – at least none for regular people – but only for rich people who joined country clubs.  No, we went out to any river or creek nearby and whiled away the hot summer afternoons.  The most fun place was an old swimming hole – a place where the water ran deep so we could dive and swim.

One day Owen, Jimmy, Othel, Elwood, some friends and I were diving and playing in the cool water.  We would dive down,  swim under, and come up splashing and panting to cling to the rocks on the other side.  Suddenly someone shouted, “Where’s Jimmy?!”

Jimmy was my favorite brother, the one out of nine kids who was closest to me in age.  I scanned the surface and then dove under, peering through the murky, bubbly water again and again.  We all did.  I became tired, but I kept going down, searching, swimming, coming up.

“No, Jimmy, No!  You can’t be gone.”  I became exhausted, then panicked.  I came to the surface once more, gasping for air.  A second time I came up, trying now to save myself.  Finally, I knew I wasn’t going to make it.

I’ll never know why I did it.  I had given up and was sinking peacefully down, when I shot my hand straight upward.  An iron grip seized my wrist.  Someone pulled me out of the water.  I was saved.

 
I wish I could tell you Jimmy was saved also.  He was found later, his body stuck under an overhang of rock.  I never got over it.  But my parents had almost lost two sons that day.  And I know that it was really God’s Hand that reached out and saved me.  Because if He had not, you, my daughter, would never have been born!