Elmer Hambaugh will never forget that Easter weekend. Especially that Monday morning when the doctors came to operate on his foot.
Good Friday morning, thinking to take a short work break, Elmer parked the city bus he drove for a living in front of a suburban Cincinnati police station. As he chatted inside, Elmer was dumbstruck to see his empty bus start slowly rolling downhill, straight for an intersection packed with rush-hour traffic.
He raced out, praying, Dear God, stop that bus!
In an absurdly heroic effort, Elmer grabbed hold of a side-panel advertisement on the vehicle and dug in his heels—only to be knocked down and dragged under the chassis, one foot caught wedge-like between a rolling rear wheel and the pavement.
And then, for no apparent reason, the bus came to a halt.
There it stood, neatly parked at a crosswalk, safe behind the white line. A city maintenance worker—a man who’d never driven a bus—rushed to Elmer’s rescue and managed to back up the vehicle.
Doctors at the hospital shook their heads when they saw Elmer’s lacerated flesh and mangled foot. Anticipating a complicated skin graft, they scheduled a Monday-morning operation.
All weekend Elmer prayed and fasted. And on Easter Monday he heard the doctors’ words of amazement, words that told of something even stranger than the fact of the bus having been suddenly stopped:
“Your foot has healed. There’s no reason to operate.”
