Raining Babies

“The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms…” [Deuteronomy 33:27]

In January 2007, Julio Gonzalez and Pedro Nevarez, two auto mechanics, caught a three-year-old boy who fell from the fifth floor of his building. The toddler, Timothy Addo, had escaped through a window while his babysitter was in the bathroom. The window had apparently been opened by the babysitter in order to have a cigarette. The men saw the child dangling from the fire escape and moved into position to make the catch. The boy only received minor injuries resulting from hitting a tree branch on his descent. “I feel like we did something good today. We were in the right place at the right time,” said Nevarez.

In Detroit sometime in the spring of 1935, a young mother must have been eternally grateful to a man named Joseph Figlock. As Figlock was walking down the street, the mother’s baby fell from a high window onto Figlock. The baby’s fall was broken by the stunned man, but incredibly both man and baby were unharmed. This was obviously a stroke of remarkable providence, but here is where the story becomes truly astonishing. A year later, the very same baby, now a heavier toddler, fell from the very same window onto poor, unsuspecting – you guessed it – Joseph Figlock as he was again passing beneath. And again, they both survived the event!

Another story with a remarkable twist happened in the early 1900s. A lighthouse keeper in Scotland was cleaning the outside lamp window when the rusted railing gave way. The terrified man fell 130 feet. When he opened his eyes he looked up, a bit dazed, at the blue sky with white puffy clouds and wondered if he was in heaven. As he collected his wits he discovered he survived the fall because he landed on a sheep that had been peacefully grazing below the lighthouse. The sheep did not survive.

Neither did Jesus. The Bible presents Christ as the sacrificial lamb who gave His life that we might be saved. Philip once explained to a curious Ethiopian eunuch who was reading a passage about Christ, “The place in the Scripture which he read was this: ‘He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so He opened not His mouth’” (Acts 8:32). When we fell into sin, Jesus offered to take the brunt of our fall with His own life.