Glad To Have Helped

In 1999, Kevin Stephan of Lancaster, New York, was a batboy for his younger brother’s Little League baseball team. During one game, a player who was warming up accidentally hit Kevin in the chest with a bat. Kevin fell to the ground, unconscious. His heart stopped beating.

“All I remember is that, all of a sudden, I got hit in the chest with something, and I turned around and passed out,” Kevin says. Penny Brown, a nurse whose son played on the team, was able to revive Kevin.

Seven years later, Penny Brown was eating at the Hillview Restaurant in Depew, New York, when she began to choke on her food. “The food wasn’t going anywhere, and I totally couldn’t breathe,” said Penny. “It was very frightening.”

Patrons screamed for help. One of the restaurant employees — a volunteer firefighter — ran out from the back. He wrapped his arms around the victim, applied the Heimlich maneuver, and saved the woman’s life. The firefighter was Kevin Stephan, the boy whom Penny had saved seven years earlier.

 — Aaron Saykin, “Teen Saves Life 
of Woman Who Once Saved His,” 
wusatv9.com (February 4, 2006)

Costly Rescue, Gracious Rescue

For four years Emperor Theodore III of Ethiopia had held a group of fifty-three European captives (thirty adults and twenty-three children), including some missionaries and a British consul. By letter Queen Victoria pleaded in vain with Theodore to release the captives, who were held in a remote nine-thousand-foot-high bastion deep in the interior.

Finally, the queen ordered a full-scale military expedition from India to march into Ethiopia, not to conquer the country and make it a British colony, but simply to rescue a tiny band of civilians.

The invasion force included thirty-two thousand men, heavy artillery, and forty-four elephants to carry the guns. Provisions included fifty thousand tons of beef and pork and thirty thousand gallons of rum. Engineers built landing piers, water treatment plants, a railroad, and a telegraph line to the interior, plus many bridges. All of this was necessary to fight one decisive battle, after which the prisoners were released. Then everyone packed up and went home. The British expended millions of pounds to rescue a handful of captives.

 — Jim Reapsome, 
Current Thoughts and Trends (May 1999)

The Red Cross

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote a book on the history of the Great Boer War in which he tells of a small detachment of British troops who, overwhelmed by enemy forces, fell back under heavy fire.  Their wounded lay in a perilous position, facing certain death.  One of them, a corporal in the Ceylon Mounted Infantry, later told that they all realized they had to come immediately under the protection of a Red Cross flag if they wanted to survive.  All they had was a piece of white cloth, but no red paint,  so they used the blood from their own wounds to make a large cross on that white cloth.  The attackers repected that grim flag as it was held aloft, and the British wounded were brought to safety.

- quoted from Preacher's Sourcebook of Creative Sermon Illustrations (Thomas Nelson, 2007)

A Mother's Selfless Rescue

Police don't know where Deborah Kemp found the strength.  But Kemp knows.  Six-year-old daughter Ashleye was in the backseat, and Kemp wasn't going to let the man steal her car after she pumped gas.  The thirty-four-year-old mother was dragged on her knees for several blocks as she clung to the door and steering wheel of the moving car.

"I wasn't trying to be a hero," she said.  "I was concerned about my baby... there was part of me in that car."  Kemp eventually pulled the suspect from the car and beat him with an anti theft club device while he apologized and begged her to stop.

The driverless car went out of control and smashed into a restaurant, breaking a gas line.  That's when the child woke up.  Kemp suffered only ripped pants and bloody knees.  The child was not injured.  The suspect can't walk: One leg is broken, the other fractured.  He also suffered head injuries.

- from an Atlanta newspaper, December 1994, submitted by Rose Hodgin to Parables, Etc. (July 1995)