At the beginning of June 1993, a friend of mine (who reads these logs from time to time) arranged for me a trip to Karabagh. I convinced another Armenian-American who was working in Yerevan at the time as part of his studies at Stanford University in Northern California to join me.
The trip was awesome and I saw things in those 3 days that changed my life, most notably our last 2 hours on the road out via Kelbajar.
Along our trip we had visited the Gandzasar monastery, where everyone in our party, believers and non-believers, purchased crosses that we wore. One of the crosses our driver Vartan hung on his rearview mirror of our jeep.
The last Church we visited was Dadivank, a place where for some reason I had the urge to put my whole body up against the outside wall of the main Church, as if taking on some type of energy from it as I said a prayer.
As we were exiting Artsakh via Kelbajar, it had been raining on and off the whole day and the roads were very muddy and slow going.
We came to a place where there was a very steep hill and trucks were waiting at the bottom of this hill to be pulled up by a very large tractor.
Part of our party had exited the jeep to show our driver the road and as we climbed the hill, our jeep had some mechanical problem and slipped out of gear.
As we descended back down the kill, all I knew was that the end of my road in life was coming and I would be meeting my maker in a matter of moments. There was no need to fight it, so I figured that I better do a good job of taping the last seconds of my life so if by chance the video camera was recovered, my family and friends would know what had happened.
I knew the end was inevitable, as along our journey, the people who were now on foot watching us speed down the hill backwards had been collecting samples of enemy munitions. One which was stuffed under my seat was an projectile used in a shoulder launched device to take out tanks. All it needed was to bump into something hard enough and it would explode, give off enough heat to fry all of us in the jeep to a crisp.
Obviously we didn’t die and were saved for some reason to continue living to do what He had intended us to do.
For those of you who do not get squeamish at the sight of blood, I invite you to take a look at the following video clip from that experience. It may also give you a better idea as to why I fear very little and am a true believer that when it is your time to go, there is nothing you can do to change it, so don’t fight it and by all means don’t live your life in fear. Of course that does not mean you don’t look before you step, but when you do step, you should never be fearful of moving forward.
One thing that you should notice is that during that mishap, there was no rain coming down. The minute and I mean in a matter of seconds of me making my way up the hill and into our jeep, the rain started coming down harder than we had ever seen on that whole trip with lightning and thunder.
It was clear to all of us that someone was watching over us that day.
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