Wendy Thaxter
An intriguing type of miracle is the multiplication of food or other items. Does God still do this? Or were these signs and wonders limited to early times? Ask Wendy Thaxter.
Caught in a bad Connecticut economy in 1991, twenty-two-yearold Wendy and her friend Sally drove to Iowa, where jobs were more plentiful. "We stayed with friends, then rented an apartment," Wendy says. Part of the apartment's appeal was the two young men who lived across the hall. The girls soon began dating them.
Sally and her boyfriend broke up, and she abruptly moved back to Connecticut, leaving Wendy with the last month's rent and other unpaid bills. Because she had no money for a security deposit on another apartment, Wendy accepted the men's offer to move in with them temporarily.
"Things were great for a while, but my boyfriend, Jack, soon started to change," Wendy says. "He grew moody and had a quick temper. Once he told me something that chilled me to the bone." Jack had said that when his wife had asked him for a divorce, he had considered killing her. He hadn't, because he didn't want their daughter growing up without parents.
Wendy was horrified. Then a friend warned her that Jack had started acting "weird," and saying odd and hostile things about her. She would have to get away from Jack. But how? She still hadn't saved any money. When her grandfather in Connecticut became ill, Wendy decided to go home.
"I started shipping boxes to my mother," Wendy recalls. "Jack thought I was putting extra junk into storage." He was behaving strangely, and she was apprehensive about leaving. What would he do when he discovered she had gone?
One Friday night both men were out, and Wendy hurriedly loaded her 1986 Thunderbird and headed for a nearby motel. "I called my boss, explained my situation, and quit my job; she was very understanding," Wendy says. "Then I called my folks in Plainville and told them to expect me sometime Sunday evening." Wendy didn't tell her parents that she was in danger-why worry them? But she tossed and turned all night. Jack worked just down the street from the motel. What if he saw her car on his way home?
Saturday at 7:00 A.M., Wendy was on her way. She stopped to fill up on gas, then counted her remaining cash before getting on the expressway. Fifty-six dollars. No credit cards. Could she make it home on that? She would have to.
She stopped only once, in Indiana, where she ate and got gas again.
By 7:00 P.M. she was somewhere near Toledo. She found a seedy motel room for thirty dollars, put another ten dollars into the gas tank, and phoned her parents. Now for a good night's sleep! But there were loud parties going on, and Wendy's door was thin with only a push-button lock. Sleep eluded her, but at least she had escaped from Jack. Just one more day and she'd be home.
She was on the road Sunday morning before dawn. "When I reached Pennsylvania, I started looking for the exit that would lead to Hartford and then Plainville," she says. "At some point I stopped and put my last five dollars into the gas tank." Wendy wasn't too worried, since she had only a few more driving hours ahead. Even if she ran out of gas a few miles from home, her father could come and get her.
But she had missed the turnoff. And when she saw the WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY sign, she knew she was in trouble. She wasn't supposed to be in New Jersey. It was close to six now, with bumper-to-bumper traffic in four lanes, moving at seventy miles per hour. She couldn't have turned off even if she had wanted to-or knew where to go. Near Paterson, she glanced at her gas gauge. It was resting on E.
Wendy panicked. The tension of the previous days had finally caught up with her, and tears streamed down her face. The four lanes merged into two because of construction, then back to four again. Somewhere along the way, 1-80 became 1-95. Wendy kept driving, waiting for her car to sputter and stop. It was a nightmare.
Sobbing, she reached the George Washington Bridge and saw the $4 TOLL sign. It might as well have been four hundred. "Oh, God, what am I going to do?" she wept. "Please get me to Connecticut .... " She reached for her change purse-perhaps she had overlooked a few coins. Yes! Wendy counted out exactly four dollars in change, not a penny more. Now she could cross the bridge, pull over, find a phone ....
"But now I was in the Bronx, and it wasn't safe to stop," she says. "I kept driving and crying and praying one long continuous prayer: 'Oh Lord, please get me to Connecticut, please, so I can call my parents .... ' "
The gauge remained on E. But the car kept going. When Wendy saw the next automatic tollbooth, however, she almost screamed. What would she do now? Hysterical, she snapped open her change purse and looked inside, even though she knew it was empty. But it wasn't empty. Again there were coins there, this time a dollar's worth, the exact amount of the toll.
"I didn't fully realize how unbelievable this was, how my gauge stayed at E and my change purse kept yielding money," she says. "I just drove on, because there wasn't any way to stop. The roads were horrendous, and I expected to blow a tire any minute. If I slowed down, drivers would honk and glare. My nerves were as taut as they could get."
Then she saw it up ahead. A sign that read WELCOME TO CONNECTICUT. Again she wept, this time thanking God for answering her prayer. "I had just asked Him to get me to Connecticut, so I expected to run out of gas as soon as I crossed the border," she says. "But I should have known God better than that. He wouldn't lead me all that way and then abandon me when I still needed Him."
No, Wendy drove several more miles to Darien, where she found the first rest stop she'd seen since Pennsylvania. She placed a collect call to her worried parents, then sat by the side of the road until they found her, filled her gas tank, and took her into the restaurant to eat her first meal since breakfast. It was almost midnight.
"I believe I went at least four hundred miles out of my way that Sunday," Wendy says. "My car was packed and heavy, and it burns a lot of gas. It also burns the second half tank much faster than the first, especially at seventy miles per hour." So there was no reason that Wendy should have been able to drive for five hours on five dollars' worth of gas. Or pay tolls from a change purse that was empty. But she did.
"This experience was the turning point in my relationship with God," she says. "I was raised Methodist and I went to church until I was confirmed. But I didn't feel close to God in church, or anywhere else. I didn't think He had much to do with us until we died." But now she feels His loving presence every day. And she believes in miracles.