"How in the world did you do it?" I was asked. "Even professional stuntmen get hurt trying things like that."
I really couldn't remember.
Several days ago, I'd fallen down the stairs--all the way to the bottom--head first and backwards; yet I found myself standing up at the end of the fall badly shaken but only a bit bruised. God had been with me every inch of the way: flipping me around to face the ceiling when I fell so I wouldn't hurt my arms trying to stop myself; making sure I didn't crash into the wall at the bend at the bottom; causing me to land at the right angle so that my head landed on a box placed near the stairs, preventing my neck from snapping back after the bottom step. In two days, most of the bruises disappeared completely. I suppose this could be reported as "lucky".
13 steps in the Saito apartment. In the U.S., that would be considered an unlucky number; in Japan, the unlucky numbers are 4 and 9, since they have the same pronunciations for "death" and "suffering". A little later that morning, I read about 7 steps, 7 steps, 8 steps, 8 steps, 8 steps in 5 temple staircases in Ezekiel's vision of a future temple (Ezek. 40:22, 26, 31, 34, 37).
Actually, for Kinya and me, that portion of scripture was boring; it just happened to be where we were reading that day...exactly where God wanted me to read. It was as if He smiled: "If I could see the number of steps on stairs in a temple thousands of years in the future, surely I can see you in a stairwell today...and take care of you in it."
