God’s Odds: A Christmas Miracle

The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel which means, ‘God is with us.’

–Matthew 1:23

First Snow, Swiss Alps © ellenwallace / Flickr.com

One of those laughable and completely unforgettable experiences occurred in the Swiss Alps on Christmas day, 1983. My wife and I had spent a year of intensive study together in Basel, Switzerland and decided to reward our efforts with a weekend in St. Moritz before returning to the U.S.

We left our hotel on Christmas morning to take the gondola from the base of a fantastic mountain peak to the top where there was reputed to be not only an unbelievable, breathtaking view…but also a great Italian restaurant.

We thought we knew where to find the departure point, but as we walked and walked, for some reason we never found it. So dressed in our light California clothing (with the sun shining it was very pleasant) we ventured on. And then on. And on and on some more.

The walk lasted for hours, and even though we had no idea where we were, we were enjoying it all. We were pleasantly lost in the most beautiful place in the world. How bad could that be?

But then everything changed. The afternoon sun disappeared behind the mountain and it was starting to get cold. Very cold. Very quickly. Also we noticed that whereas earlier there were many people all around us, now we couldn’t see a single person anywhere in sight. So it wasn’t so fun anymore, or laughable. We were a long way from our hotel, we were getting very tired and cold, and it dawned on us that we were lost. Dangerously lost.

We had nothing to do but to keep moving, but we calculated that we were about halfway up the side of the mountain and we didn’t have the energy to go very much farther. And in any case we didn’t know in which direction to go.

Now, for the first time, we were truly afraid. We uttered a few brief prayers for help, thinking, How could we get ourselves in this situation? Then just as we walked around a large snow bank we saw sitting right in front of us the most amazing, totally unpredictable sight: a one horse open sleigh. It was just sitting there with its driver. There were no people anywhere in sight, not even the sound of anyone else. Why was he there? There was no apparent reason for a sleigh to be at that place, at that time of the day, and far from anything.

The only thing we could see from there was a large resort far away, at the very bottom of the mountain. But still no people. So we asked him if he could take us to that resort. He nodded, we hopped in, he threw a heavy blanket over us, and off we went, flying down the side of the snow covered Swiss Alps on Christmas day, with sleigh bells ringing in a one horse open sleigh, and laughing all the way. All we could think of was, “Is this some sort of movie?”

It was only later that we began to ask the real questions: What were the odds of that? Why was he right there when no one else was anywhere around. Was he an angel in a sleigh, or a man who “just happened” to be there with no apparent reason (except to rescue us).

Whether human or divine, on that day he was our angel, and we just said, “Thank you, Lord, for saving us. And, by the way…that was really a nice touch with the sleigh.”