God Saves...

I sat with a man tonight who obviously loves telling stories. He is 76 and from the "old country": Germany. He immigrated here after the war, and like my grandparents, strove to make a new life for himself in a completely new world. Being able to sit and hear the stories that comes from a life like this fascinates and challenges me.

As we were sitting around the table, he started his final story by saying, "This will be my last story, but I have to tell you...because you need to know." And then he began to share:

He lived in a small village as a child. His father was a farmer and their house was a ways off the main road. All the land they had in the back was filled with hay piles "about this big" he told us, pointing to the roof of the tent we were sitting under (about 10 feet high) and "three more feet out that way" he pointed, showing us an area about 10 feet wide. One night during the Second World War, his family got news that the Russians were coming to town. "They were coming to rape our women, kill our children, and plunder what little was in our town," he told us. So in order to save the family, the four grandparents had everyone crawl down into the basement and covered the doors with piles of firewood. "They were the only ones who knew where we were. And there was no way we could push that firewood away to open the doors. So if anything happened to them, we would suffocate in there."

That night, the Russians came. Somehow, the grandparents were found out and began to run (those details were left out of the story and Im a little fuzzy on why or what happened with the "finding out"). They ran into the back fields and decided to hide in the middle of one of the big hay piles. They dug a hole out of the center, all four climbed in, and they filled the hole back in. Now hidden, they could only pray that God saved them. 

Realizing they must be hiding, the Russians began to stab the hay piles with their bayonets. "When they came to the one my grandparents were in, 5 stabs went in: the first on the right of the outside person, moving down the line to be in between each body, and the last on the left side of the other end." Had it been any closer, they would have been found out, killed, and the rest of the family would have died in the basement. God saved their lives... by inches.

"Christianity is not just an ideal. It involves the supernatural." His point of the story was that God was merciful, and they recognized it as God - something many of us don't do anymore. We recognize a near accident that we just miss as lucky. We see our healing as the doctor's knowledge and modern medicine. Not that God doesn't work through those things, but we need to give credit where credit is due.

And recognize that time again, God saves our lives... by inches.

...

Lesson for Today: When you arent sure what to do with people you dont know, tell stories.