One morning in February 1974 Jim Petersen was awakened in his hotel room in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, by sirens. Fire trucks were stopping outside. He pulled on a pair of pants and a jacket and went downstairs and out of the hotel. Across the street a 25-story building was burning. A column of fire was shooting up the center of it, and the stairs and the elevator shaft were burned out so that everyone inside was trapped.
On the roof about a hundred people were looking down on the fire below them, sure that they would be rescued. Many more had climbed out on the ledges outside their windows. He stood there horrified as he saw the fire leap from section to section. The flames would burst through another room, there would be an explosion and the glass would shatter. People at that window would fall back and die or else fall to the ground.
The building was too high for the hook-and-ladder trucks to reach everyone. Helicopters flew over and tried to drop ropes to the people, but the updraft from the fire was too great and the helicopters couldn’t get close enough. As Jim watched the vain attempts of the fire department, he thought, WHY CAN’T THEY DO SOMETHING?
For three hours he watched 190 people die. It was hard for his mind to take in what he was seeing. Luke 13:4 kept running through his mind: Jesus commenting on the headlines of the day – eighteen people had died when a tower had fallen on them. Did God decide these eighteen were so bad he had to do away with them, so he herded them underneath the tower and let it fall and smash them? “No,” Jesus said, “but it reminds you that unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
After the fire was over Jim was walking through this city of eight million, being jostled by the crowds that are always in the streets, and suddenly he realized what Luke 13 really says. It meant every person in Sao Paulo was in that burning building. In fact, every person on earth is there. We are all terminal, and disasters remind us that unless we repent we will all likewise perish.
As the truth of that hit him, Jim found myself saying to God, WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING? As he studied the Bible, he found that God has done something.