The 56 year old actress is one of a few devout Christian actors in Hollywood. She goes to church regularly and she is vocal about her faith. She happens to go to the same church as Denzel Washington in West Los Angeles. In an interview with Christian Post late last year, she shared about the challenges of unanswered prayer and her thoughts on guardian angels:
“Prayers are answered in their own time, we pray for what we think we want right now, but to answer that one might set of a chain reaction of other things we might not want,” the actress knowingly imparted.
“As they say, there’s grace and there’s mercy; grace is a gift you don’t deserve, and mercy is a punishment you do deserve, but God keeps from you,” she laughed.
Then, Bassett told CP of a moment she will never forget, when God’s grace saved her from a hopeless and frightening situation on Los Angeles’ Highway 101.
“I believe in guardian angels, I have been stranded on the freeway on the way to an audition. It seems trivial, but not to me, it was a big deal,” she began to explain. “I was driving and my jeep’s gas gauge wasn’t fixed. LA is a driving culture, you can’t be late, you want to be a professional person, on the 101, accelerating and going nowhere fast, the pedometer kept going down, and I went into the median.”
In a time before cell phones, Bassett had literally nowhere to turn.
“I remember praying, ‘Oh lord,’ I threw my hands up, ‘Lord you gonna have to help me, I don’t know what to do,'” she recounted. “And then within 30 seconds, a flatbed truck drove up in front of me, backed up, drove down to a gas station, and pumped $10 gas, for me.”
With a simple act of kindness, a stranger saved the actress from a dire position, all while reaffirming her faith in God.
“He was just an answered prayer, an angel in that moment, I was stranded and I said a prayer,” Bassett noted. “I didn’t get the job though, what I got was so much more.”
Angela Bassett On Prayer and Angels