“For He will give His angels charge concerning you, to guard you in all your ways.” Psalm 91:11 (NASB)
In the Agape Force it seemed as if you spent at least half your life riding in a van. Combined mileage for AF teams was literally in the millions of miles. Amazingly, miraculously, not one of us was killed on the highway in almost twenty years, but we did have several miraculous close encounters.
One such encounter happened on April 4, 1979. A Canadian Agape Force team was driving from Edmonton, Alberta to Toronto Ontario to go door to door. With one car and a van in this small caravan, they were making tracks across the Canadian plains.
Six young men, Glen Spilchen, Brad Powell, Dowen Cole, Loren Mikalek, Guy Schultz, and Dave Dalton were riding in the van. They also had the luggage and a large supply of records that were stacked in a compartment in the back of the van.
Dowen Cole was driving, Glen Spilchen was riding “shot gun” and Dave Dalton was sleeping in about 18 inches of space between the top of the record boxes and the roof of the van.
They had just come through Windsor, Ontario where they were surprised to meet another Canadian team returning to Toronto from an outreach in Mexico. As the teams were leaving the “all you can eat” restaurant, the weather turned bad. Soon they were driving through a snow storm. The wind was howling. Snow was blowing. Soon the highway iced over.
No Agape Force van was complete without a tape of Christian songs playing in the cassette deck. That day, as they drove along in the snow, they were listening to the joyful gospel beat of Andre Crouche’s “Soon and Very Soon We Are Going to See the King.”
Trying to keep pace with the car in which team leader, Jonathan Follows was riding, the driver of the van worked to battle the strong winds and icy roads. Suddenly as the van went under an overpass, and the van swerved violently. The winds which had been buffeting them were suddenly cut off. Attempts at compensating proved disastrous on the icy road and in just a moment they were completely out of control.
The van hit the grass median dividing the highway and flipped onto it’s roof. Instead of stopping in the median, however, it continued sliding into oncoming traffic.
As this was happening, the driver, Dowen Cole, thought of another accident that had occurred some years before. In that accident, the Lord spoke to one of the girls in the van, telling her to lift her head when the van flipped and started to slide. Just as she lifted her head, that part of the roof was torn away. As Dowen slid along upside down, the Lord reminded him of that and he lifted his head. Just at that moment something smashed into the roof right where his head had been. One word from the Lord had saved two lives in two separate incidents on two completely different highways at two different times.
Meanwhile God was also speaking to Dave Dalton, who found himself sliding along, penned under hundred of pounds of luggage and supplies. “I will give my angels charge concerning you,” the Lord spoke into his mind, “to guard you in all your ways.”
Someone cried out “OH, GOD!” and Andre just kept singing “Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King.”
As the van slid into oncoming traffic, Glen Spilchen braced himself for the crash and thought, “This is it! Our lives are finished!” But somehow, inconceivably, the crash never came.
The van finally slid to a stop in the second lane of oncoming traffic. Guys were hanging upside down in their seat belts. Dave Dalton was trapped underneath the press of luggage and records that he had been sleeping on top of. How he avoided being crushed by all the gear he had been lying on top of only God knows, but as he lay there trying not to panic the Lord spoke one more word. “Relax”.
Loren Mikalek got out first and was running around in the snow in his stocking feet, trying to set flares. As the others began to emerge they discovered that they were stopped on a curve where it would be difficult for oncoming traffic to see them. They also noticed that they had just missed smashing into the concrete pillar of the overpass.
Two oncoming vehicles had pulled to the side of the road. Miraculously, the van slid between those two cars without hitting either one. One driver had accelerated while one had braked.
Having left the restaurant a few minutes later, the team coming up from Mexico, was also battling the ice and snow. “Look, there’s a van upside down in the road,” someone said. “That looks like an Agape Force van.” A moment later someone else said, “That IS an AF van. As this van came to a stop no one wanted to get out. It didn’t look as if anyone would be left alive. They wept and prayed that the Lord’s hand would be on their fellow travelers.
In a few minutes someone pulled away a few boxes and saw Dave’s smiling face. Though the roof was slashed, he wasn’t hurt. No one was seriously hurt. Glen and Dowen had small cuts and bruises and several were shaking from the shock, but that was it. Surely God had set his angels around them to rescue them from harm.
Glen Spilchen remembers feeling very strongly that he should have died in that accident. “God had saved me. All my remaining days were by His grace alone. I gave myself over even more completely to His will and purposes in a deeper and more meaningful way than ever before...it is no longer I who live”, he says, “but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.”
Dave Dalton celebrates every April 4th as I’M STILL ALIVE DAY, knowing that on that day, in 1979, God delivered six young men from death by His loving and powerful hand.
Glen Spilchen/Mark Dalton