Proof of Angels: The Definitive Book on the Reality of Angels and the Surprising Role They Play in Each of Our Lives - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Ptolemy Tompkins is a former editor at Guideposts Magazine and the author of seven books. His writing has been featured in Beliefnet, Harper’s, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best American Spiritual Writing.

Tyler Beddoes was born in Provo, Utah. He studied Criminal Justice and Journalism at Utah Valley University. He joined the Police Department in Spanish Fork, Utah in 2006. While a member of the Police Department he has been awarded an exemplary service award. He was also recognized by the Mayor of Spanish Fork and the United States Congress for his involvement in the miraculous rescue of Lily Groesbeck from the Spanish Fork River on the morning of March 7, 2015. He currently resides in Elk Ridge, UT with his wife Brittany and their two children, Gracie and Gunnar.

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Proof of Angels

CHAPTER 1

An Occurrence on Spanish Fork Bridge

Ten years ago I had what could only be described as a nervous breakdown. I was thirty-three and depressed. I was afraid of dying and all the other symptoms of this illness. I was alone one day and a voice spoke to me. The voice came from within but was clear and distinct. It simply said, “Carry on as you are and you are dead.” From that moment I started to get better and grew strong in mind and body. I feel a new person. I find I am able to help others with similar problems. The strange thing is though I have not heard the voice since, I feel that something or someone is watching over me and having a large influence on my thoughts and life. I also have this very strong feeling that we, mankind that is, are a part of something far beyond my comprehension. My life has new meaning and purpose.

—SEEING THE INVISIBLE

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1776, two Franciscan friars searching for a route from Santa Fe to Monterey, California, happened to stop at a spot in northern Utah where a canyon met up with a small river. This little confluence of canyon and river eventually began to go by the name of Spanish Fork.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, when the influx of Mormons into Utah was in full swing, Spanish Fork had become a town in earnest—a small but solid “X” on the map of potential destinations for Mormon pioneers from the Eastern states or outside the country (Spanish Fork still has a particularly high number of Mormon immigrants with Icelandic blood).

Today, Spanish Fork is a town of some forty thousand people with a reasonably good economy (thanks in large part to Provo, home of Brigham Young University, where many of its residents work) and which hovers, like a thousand other towns like it across the country, somewhere between the old America and the new. Last spring, a Walmart opened on U.S. Route 6 outside town, consigning to doom the already teetering Kmart that had killed off a good portion of the downtown’s older businesses when it itself went up in the late eighties. On Main Street and its cross streets, the mishmash of shops with local Western character that hung on till the early eighties has now been replaced by the mini-mall shop fronts you see in every town across America. There’s a Verizon store, a Sonic drive-in, a Taco Bell, and (proof that the town has truly made the jump from then to now) a Starbucks.

Main Street runs north to south through town. Then, without changing its name, it leaves its stores and gas stations behind and gives way to flat farm country, fields of wheat and corn and alfalfa punctuated by an occasional clutch of houses: landscape that hasn’t changed for decades. To the east, the Wasatch Mountains stand as they have for millions of years, their particularly hard, granular snow drawing thousands of skiers to the area every winter.

About a mile outside town, Main Street crosses the Spanish Fork River, the source of the town’s name but now little more than an unassuming, domesticated runoff that empties into Utah Lake some ten miles farther west. Before white settlers arrived and drove them out, a nomadic Native American tribe known as the Ute, or “fish eaters,” used to camp on the river’s banks in the summer months to take advantage of the plentiful fish that crowded its waters, and which, though in much smaller numbers, still lure fishermen to its banks. The first Western-style house went up in Spanish Fork in 1850, and the last of the Ute were driven out by the late 1880s, when Mormon settlers were pouring into the area in their greatest numbers, following Brigham Young’s resolution to take the religion given to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni to the virgin lands of the West.

The new arrivals set to turning Spanish Fork into the place it remains today: a small, friendly town, still largely Mormon but (sins against the Ute committed in the previous century notwithstanding) amicable to members of other faiths as well. The town is a genuine community, built in the spirit that America was founded on: faith in a common God, expressed in different ways.

Narrow (about fifteen feet at its widest point) and sluggish save for the spring months when it comes to life with runoff from the Wasatch Mountains, the Spanish Fork River captured media attention only once, in 1983, when it briefly made headlines across the country after a massive spring landslide caused by excessively heavy rains sealed it off some ten miles upriver from Spanish Fork, just below the little town of Thistle. Foreshadowing the kinds of water disasters that are regular business in the West these days, a lake formed from the backed-up water, deep enough to drown out Thistle and kill it permanently. It took two weeks and two million dollars before a tunnel could be bored through the sludge and mud and the river set to flowing again, making it at the time the nation’s costliest water disaster on record.

At around 10:00 p.m. on Friday, March 6, 2015, Jennifer Lynn Groesbeck was driving her 2009 red Dodge Caliber home from dinner with her dad in Salem, a town some five miles south of Spanish Fork, to her home in Springville, a town to the northeast situated about halfway between the mountains to the east and Provo Bay to the north. Traveling on Main Street at or close to the speed limit of 45 miles per hour, Jennifer veered inexplicably to the right just before reaching the Spanish Fork Bridge and went into the river.

The car left the road with a strange and tragic accuracy. Had Jennifer swerved just a foot or two earlier, she would have struck a small stand of trees: trees that were big enough to stop her car but small enough, and with enough give in their trunks, that they most likely would have brought it to a halt gently enough not to harm anyone inside. Likewise, had Jennifer traveled just a few feet farther before swerving, the right side of her car would have struck the graduated divider that runs the length of the bridge. In that situation, too, her car most likely would have ground to a halt before going into the river.

But Jennifer went off the road right between those two barriers. When her car swerved, her right front wheel missed the graduated divider, while her left front wheel caught its edge and rode up it, causing the car to flip as it sailed over the water. It landed upside down with brutal force in the shallows three-quarters of the way across the river, blowing out the windshield and bringing the roof down like a mousetrap on Jennifer’s upper body, killing her instantly.

Unlikely and unlucky as Jennifer’s crash into the river was, people who knew her were quick to say that Jenny Lynn had no reason to end her life. She was young and well liked, and she was enrolled at Provo College in the medical assistant program. She also had a new baby: eighteen-month-old Lily, who was in the car with her the night of the crash and whose unlikely survival (not only of the crash itself but also of the long hours before the car’s discovery) was soon to become news all around the world.

Unseen and unnoticed, the car sat as it had landed in the river for the next fourteen hours, the 45-degree water entering through the shattered upstream passenger’s side window and flowing back out the driver’s side, accommodating with ease and indifference to the new obstacle in its path. Behind Jenny, still strapped snugly in the car seat in which Jenny had placed her less than half an hour earlier, Lily lay suspended upside down in the dark, some twelve inches above the flowing water, which for the remainder of the night...