"I didn't need to be afraid ..."

Susan L. Van Buskirk

It started out as an innocent walk to a nearby shopping center. It was well past 10:00 p.m., but my friend and I went because we wanted a place to talk away from the house. Two weeks had passed since our high-school graduation, and there were a lot of things to talk about.

When we reached the open parking lot, all the stores were closed, so we just sat by a light post and talked for about half an hour. We started walking home, across this huge parking lot, when a car drove by very close to us, with some fellows shouting obscenities. We just kept on walking. There was an unpopulated area we had to go through to reach my home. We'd gone about a block when this same car came up behind us, slowed down, and began to follow us. The fellows called my friend names and threatened to beat him up; then they started saying what they'd like to: do with me. I felt very threatened; there were four of them and only two of us. "I'm really getting mad," my friend whispered.

As we were going through the darkest section I began thinking how ironic it was that we were walking on the future site of our town's police station. That made me think of protection, and how I could turn to God in any situation. So that's what I did—I prayed, asking God what I needed to know. Lines from my favorite hymn in the Christian Science Hymnal came to mind, and I started singing them to myself:

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