E's brush with death (one of them!)

I'm in the mood for the miraculous. See the picture to the left. That is a tree that fell during Hurricane Ivan. It fell from a ditch behind the house and missed the house by an inch. When we returned from Birmingham, we were met with such devestation everywhere that two huge trees in our yard barely bothered us. My dad had come with us to cut up the trees, as he is great with a chain saw, but we were all a little distracted and stressed. I had told the boys to play in the front yard while we worked in the back.

All went smoothly until I had a sudden vision that the boys had come around and were playing in the ditch behind the house. That also put them under the giant root ball of the tree we were cutting. I started toward the ditch yelling over the chainsaw for them to move and go back around. As I was moving toward them the tree started to stand back up, pushing the root ball back down into the ditch. In all the years I have watched my dad cut trees, I have never seen a tree do that. My dad jumped back from cutting, yelling for us to get back. I started screaming at the boys to move. It really was like slow motion. I watched M move out of the way, but E was crying that his boot was stuck and was trying to get it out of the mud. When the tree snapped into an upright position, we could not see E. The last we had seen, was his tiny body standing where the five foot root ball now rested. I stood in shock and watched my husband slide under the fence into the ditch and I took off running around the house to the back. By the time I got there I knew E was gone. With my heart pounding in my ears I grabbed M and ran to the ditch. There, shaking in my husband's arms, was E. No one knows how he got out. We had watched the tree come down on him.

There were so many miracles. First, God told me they were in the ditch and needed to get out, NOW! Then E was snatched out from under the tree by an angel. There is no way he could have gone from where we last saw him to 5 feet away to safety in the amount of time that he had.

The same weekend a little boy died in Baldwin County by being crushed by a root ball of a tree that stood back up while it was being cut up. I don't know why God saved E, but it proved to me that God is doing far more to protect my children than I will ever be able to do. Instead of making me paranoid, it showed me that God loves my boys way more than I do! How wonderful to partner with an all seeing God while parenting.