Photo from WYMT News
It was late in the afternoon on Wednesday when volunteer firefighters responded to a house fire in Garrett, Kentucky. By the time they arrived, most of the house had burned to the ground.
Assistant Chief Grady Allen told WYMT News that “the house was fully involved for the most part with extensive fire damage throughout.”
Firefighters put out the flames and then entered to search for hot spots, assuming that nothing in the home had survived. But they were surprised to find one item that hadn’t been destroyed: A Bible.
Allen recalled, “There in the midst of this house fire was a picture of the Lord’s Supper on a Bible that was just barely burnt.”
Though the Bible had been resting on a shelf in the middle of one of the worst damaged parts of the house, with nothing to shield it from the fire, it was miraculously preserved.
“They picked it up and found for the most part 85 to 90 percent intact,” said Allen. “Nothing else on that shelf was recognizable as whatever it may have been but the Bible was still recognizable and was still for the most part intact.”
Allen admitted to WYMT News that this wasn’t his first time finding a Bible preserved in a house fire. In 15 years of serving as a firefighter, he has found at least six or seven Bibles still intact despite everything else around them having been destroyed.
“I’ve seen them to where the table that the Bible was sitting on was scorched all the way around, and you could pick the Bible up and it was not touched and underneath the table where the Bible was at was not burned at all,” said Allen.
For Allen, these occurrences seem to be signs from God. “To see something that gives you hope and inspiration like the Bible standing in pretty much the pits of hell and surviving it all the way through really gives you hope that there is something else out there,” he said.
Fortunately, no one was injured during the fire. And while the damage to property is heartbreaking and will prove to be a challenge in the months ahead, the preservation of God’s Word seems to be a reminder that Christ will always be there, no matter what trials may surround us.