It happened around noon on Mother’s day. According to a national news report, twenty-seven-year-old Michael Murray decided to take his two children to the medical center where their mother was on duty as a surgical nurse. The family wanted to drop off some Mother’s Day presents: a gold necklace with the words “Number 1 Mom,” and a single rose. With their mission accomplished the father and his two children made their way back to the darkened indoor garage where the car had been parked.
Murray gently set the infant seat and three-month-old Matthew on the sunroof of the car and turned his attention to buckling Matthew’s twenty-month-old sister into her seat and drove off, forgetting that Matthew was still on the roof. Moving slowly from the darkened garage into the bright sunlight, Murray drove through busy streets toward Interstate 290. Despite heavy traffic, nobody beeped or waved to warn him that anything was wrong. Pulling onto the expressway that cuts through the city, the driver accelerated to 50 miles-per-hour and then he heard it, a scraping on the roof of the car as the tiny seat with Matthew strapped in began to slide. He said, “I looked to where Matthew should have been in the car, and then in the rear view mirror I saw him sliding down the highway in his infant seat. “That’s where he landed. In the middle of the interstate, in the path of oncoming traffic….”
The car seat flew off the roof and hit the road and was sliding down the highway almost as fast as the cars were coming toward it. An antique dealer named James Boothby was following the Murray car when he saw the whole event unfold right before his eyes. He saw young Matthew sail off the roof and hit the road. He said: “I saw something in the air. At first I thought someone had thrown some garbage out the window. Then I saw it and thought it was a doll. Then the doll opened its mouth and I realized this was a little baby. It just landed on the road and slid along a bit. I slammed on my brakes and turned my car around in the lane so that no other cars could go by. I jumped from the car, and I ran and found an uninjured baby in an undamaged car seat, and scooped him up in my arms and took him back and gave him to his petrified father.
The story is hailed as being an example that miracles, true miracles still happen today. However, I can go one better than that. Any time a person calls out in true and sincere sorrow over his or her sins and invites Jesus Christ into his or her heart, that is an even greater miracle.
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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate in KeruxID 25837-26027]