“God, I want to come closer to you.”
That prayer came after a vacation and before Pastor Sue Detweiler laid her 5-week-old daughter in her crib and fell into bed, exhausted.
“And then my husband headed to the church to be ready for the next morning service. And so I fell into a deep sleep,” Detweiler tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. But her prayer wasn’t the only one that moved mountains that night.
“Suddenly I woke up and Rachel was screaming, and it was a different type of scream,” she says. “I had never heard that type of scream; it was fear. And so I got up, and I am trying to get to a room … a mother knows how to get to her baby’s room. But somehow I got turned around in a closet. And I got all disoriented. … I went across the room; I touched the windowpane, put it up, put my head out and realize that my house was on fire. And I didn’t know how to get out of my room. And I didn’t have the capacity to even get to my daughter.
“And it was in that moment that I dropped to my knees,” Detweiler says.” And I did what everyone—if you’re facing death, you do this whether you know Jesus or not—you just pray that prayer, ‘Help.’
“I was helpless; I could not have found my way out,” she adds.
Right at that time, the Lord sent her husband home. He saw the fire lighting up the sky, the house being built next door burnt to the ground. Running up to the firemen, he asked, “Did you get my wife and baby out?”
They dropped their hoses and ran into the house, Detweiler says. Before long, she and the baby had been rescued and rushed to the hospital, where they had “all sorts of treatment through the night,” she says.
“Finally, in the morning, we called my mom,” she recalls, adding that she was still frantic and emotional, but her mother remained calm.
“You’re the one I’ve been praying for,” her mother said.
“And she had been praying,” Detweiler says. “She had taken time, a month, to fast and pray about Isaiah 43, and part of that is ‘You will go through the fire and you will not be burned; the flames will not continue.’
“And there was a struggle that night; the fire trucks had been stopped by a train,” Detweiler says. “There had been a struggle, and God won the struggle. And He saved us from death.”
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