A lightning strike reportedly ignited a massive fire last Tuesday night at the historic, 150-year-old, First Baptist Church in Wakefield, Massachusetts.
Everything inside the church was turned to ashes.
Well…, almost everything.
Miraculously, the fire crews found one thing in the rubble that survived the brutal flames somehow.
It was a lone painting.
A painting depicting Jesus Christ, standing in a white robe with hands, bearing the marks of crucifixion, extended.
The painting somehow survived…, untouched!
“It’s a beautiful sign of hope and a reminder that Jesus is with us,” church member Maria Kakolowski told a local TV station. “I am personally just taking it as a sign and a reminder that Jesus, the Christ that we serve, is still alive and even though our church building is gone, our “church” is still here. The God that we serve is still here.”
According to Lucia I. Suarez Sang, a Reporter for FoxNews.com, “Crews began dismantling the remnants of the historic building last Wednesday morning. There is no official cause of the fire, however, residents nearby said they saw lightning hit the church’s steeple.”
The fire was reported after powerful thunderstorms rolled through the greater Boston area.
In a statement, church officials expressed their gratitude that no parishioners were hurt and thanked the fire department for battling the seven-alarm blaze.
“We know that we serve a God who specializes in restoring brokenness and who can bring beauty even from ashes,” they wrote. “So we move into the future with trust, hope, and gratitude.”
Pastor Norm Bendroth said he was settling down to watch the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series last Tuesday night when he saw “a fireball in the sky.”
“It just went up like a tinderbox. It’s a building built in 1870 and it’s a balloon-style (an all wood structure building that uses long, vertical 2″ x 4″ lumber for the exterior walls), so once the fire started you know the whole building just went up quickly,” he said.
According to the National Register of Historic Places, the structure was constructed around 1872 and rebuilt after a fire in 1912.
The estimated damage was more than $1 million.
The town’s fire chief, Michael Sullivan, told the Boston Globe newspaper that, “the extent of the fire on arrival was just too great for us to stop it.”
He added, “It’s a shame, it was a beautiful church. We feel bad about that but there’s really nothing we could do.”
A “GoFundMe” page has been set-up to help the church.
Do you believe in miracles?
How else can this painting surviving completely unscathed be explained?
Please email me and let me know what you think!
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