Several things clicked into place for David, pastor of Ambassadors’ Christian Center. The previous Monday, he had spoken to his congregation. “Something is about to happen,” he warned in a calm voice. “I have no idea what it is, but I do know that we have no reason to be afraid. Whatever it is, I want us to be prepared. First of all, step up your prayers for protection, especially praying Psalm 91. I also want you to stock up on emergency supplies and buy extra food and water.”
A couple of nights after that, David dreamed about a flood. In the dream he saw rain that wouldn’t quit. Buildings disappeared under the water, falling apart—homes and businesses destroyed.
Now this, he thought looking outside at sheets of unrelenting rain. “Ashley’s here!” his wife, Donna, called. Their daughter, Ashley, was the senior executive assistant to the city manager and lived downtown.
“Today at work I felt impressed by the Lord to pack a bag and spend the night here,” Ashley explained. “I thought it over and decided to come watch movies with you this evening but not spend the night. But when I got home from work, the Lord told me again to pack a bag and stay. So here I am!”
“I’m glad you’re here,” David said, hugging his daughter.
He’d like to think that their home was the safest place in Columbia.
Except for one thing. About 800- 880 yards away, on the other side of the neighborhood clubhouse, the Broad River had already overflowed its banks. If it flooded, they were right in its path.
A Bright Light
“That evening we alternated between watching movies and the weather,” David recalls. “ e next day, Saturday, Oct. 3, the rain was heavier. Weather forecasters and city officials gave continual warnings to stay inside and off streets as the situation worsened. People were rushing to stores and emptying shelves. Businesses closed early as people settled down to ride out the storm.
“That evening it seemed as though a bucket broke and the heavens opened. This was way past what could be considered normal amounts of rain. We’d lived in Columbia since 1989, and we’d never seen anything like it. It rained hard and heavy, the sound of rain interrupted by great claps of thunder. We prayed Psalm 91 and thanked God for His protection.
“We had eight security cameras which allowed us to monitor the rain from every direction. It was an incredible sight; hard not to watch. That night, Ashley went to bed but Donna and I stayed up until 2 a.m.”
David locked all the doors and turned off the inside and outside lights. Finally in bed, he and Donna listened to the raging storm, unable to sleep.
“What was that?” Donna asked, sitting up in bed.
“What?” “I just saw a bright light out the window.”
“I turned out all the lights,” David said, climbing out of bed to go check. Looking from the second story toward the front of the house, he saw a bright light but couldn’t tell where it came from.
David walked down the hall to the bonus room and adjusted the channel on the television so he could monitor all eight surveillance cameras. Every camera showed the same thing— pounding rain and lightning—every camera except one. at camera, pointed toward the front of the house, was lit against the storm.
Leaning forward for a better look, David felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. A light, the size of Ashley’s sedan, was shaped like a hand. Hovering above the cars, it appeared to be a great hand of fi re. He could make out the thumb and the pointed index finger.
Supernatural Help
“Donna! Come here, you’ve got to see this!”
“Oh!” Donna gasped. “Look at that!”
David turned on the DVR to record the scene as they watched in awe. “The light was so bright it lit the bedroom,” David explained.
“Look at the direction the hand is pointing,” Donna said.
“Yeah?” “It’s pointing toward the Broad River! The hand of God is holding back the water!”
After an hour or so, Donna went back to bed. David stayed up the rest of the night, staring at the phenomenon and pondering its meaning. He was tempted to go outside and stand in the rain just to be near it. But the weather was strange and everything outside looked peculiar. Lightning flashed on the horizon and the rumbling thunder felt ominous.
David knew that angelic activity had increased on the earth in these last days. And in their lives, there had been more manifestations since Norvel Hayes had prayed for them, prophesying that angels would start assisting them with their ministry. Neighbors walking down the street had stopped and said, “I’ve seen things in your backyard that look like angels!”
In the fall of 2012, the IRS had claimed that their church owed more than $50,000 in withholding taxes. It wasn’t true; the church didn’t owe anything. But the battle still had to be fought, and going up against the IRS felt a lot like facing Goliath.
David and Donna had planted seed for victory into Kenneth Copeland Ministries, both personally and through the church. When Kenneth Copeland traveled to Columbia for the 2013 Word Explosion, David had taken the opportunity to tell him about the situation. Brother Copeland prayed, using his authority in a powerful way.
Twelve days later, when David checked the security monitors in the morning, he was stunned at what he saw. The cameras had captured the image of two angels with swords drawn, guarding the front of their house. Later that evening, another angel had appeared at the back door.
“Lord, what is this?” David asked.
Your angels. He and Donna knew without a doubt that those angels had come in response to Brother Copeland’s prayers. Sure enough, the IRS conceded that they hadn’t done anything wrong after all. The battle had been won in the heavenlies, not in the courtroom.
A while later, David was in the grocery store when he ran into a neighbor who said he had seen something in David’s backyard that looked like angels. David asked, “Did they look like this?” and showed him the pictures of the angel at the back door.
The man studied the photographs. “Yes! They looked very similar.
“I’m an engineer,” he said, “and I can tell you that these have not been photoshopped.”
A Thousand-Year Flood
It was 5 a.m. and rain was still hitting their house like machine-gun fi re. Certain that angels were on guard, David fell into an exhausted sleep.
The next morning when they turned on the news, Governor Nikki Haley was urging everyone to stay inside. “ is isn’t a hundred-year rain,” she explained. “It’s a thousand-year rain! at means it’s been an estimated thousand years since we’ve had this kind of rain. The city is flooding and roads have been washed away. Stay inside!”
“When we got up Sunday morning, we realized that the Broad River had been flooding during the night but we hadn’t known it at the time,” Donna remembers. “There were two major streets into our neighborhood and both of them were flooded. One of the roads had collapsed and two trucks had fallen into the sinkhole. There was no way in or out of our neighborhood.
“None of this made sense to us. Our house is a two- to four-minute walk or a one- to two-minute bike ride to the Broad River. That river had flooded in every direction except ours! We should have been underwater, but not a single house on our street was flooded.
“Looking out our back window, it looked like Niagara Falls cresting over the upper part of our yard. Th e gushing water should have flooded the back of our house. But it was as though Moses was standing there with his rod lifted, because the water parted and gushed down either side of our home to the street. What we were watching wasn’t possible in the natural! “
The downtown area where Ashley lived had been hit hard. If she’d stayed home, she would have been trapped, alone with no way out. Yet we were right next to the river and not a single house on our street flooded. Two to three days later, people would walk down to the river and scratch their heads—it had flooded in every direction except toward us.”
The Power of the Blood
The situation was so dangerous, the city issued a curfew. Some who ventured out drowned. People who left home and weren’t back inside by 7 p.m. were ticketed or sent to jail. The Jenkins weren’t able to get out of their neighborhood for three days.
True to the word of knowledge given to David Jenkins—something had been coming. He and his congregation were prayed up and stocked up, ready to ride out the storm of a millennium.
“It reminded me of the children of Israel when they put the blood of the lamb over their doorposts,” David says. “When the death angel passed over, every living thing died except those protected by the blood. I’m so grateful to be a Partner with KCM. I’m grateful for their teaching on Psalm 91 and for teaching us how to live by faith. I’m grateful for the power of prayer that dispatched angels to our door, right when our city was hit with trillions of gallons of rain.”
David and Donna Jenkins are convinced that the Broad River was forbidden to flood their street because the hand of God was set against it. Those angels and that hand were reminiscent of the story of Elisha in 2 Kings 6:14-17:
So [the Syrian king] sent there horses, chariots, and a great army. They came by night and surrounded the city. When the servant of the man of God rose early and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was around the city. Elisha’s servant said to him, Alas, my master! What shall we do? [Elisha] answered, Fear not; for those with us are more than those with them. Then Elisha prayed, Lord, I pray You, open his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the young man’s eyes, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fi re round about Elisha ( Thee Amplified Bible, Classic Edition, emphasis added).
The thing about angels is this: Whether you see them or not, they are there, ministering to you, surrounding you and protecting you. In uncertain times, God’s Word is certain.
