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| "I was her arms to get out of the pool. It'll be okay. I am now her lungs. Together we can make it." |
I Be Your Legs
Bob Butler lost his legs in a 1965 land mine
explosion in Vietnam. He returned home a war hero. Twenty years later, he
proved once again heroism comes from the heart.
Butler was working in his garage in a small town in
Arizona on a hot summer day when he heard a woman's screams coming from a
nearby house. He began rolling his wheelchair toward the house, but the dense
shrubbery wouldn't allow him access to the back door. So he got out of his
chair
and started to crawl through the dirt and bushes.
"I had to get there," he says, "It
didn't matter how much it hurt. "When Butler arrived at the pool there was
a three-year-old girl named Stephanie Hanes lying at the bottom. She had been
born without arms and had fallen in the water and couldn't swim. Her mother
stood over her baby screaming frantically. Butler dove to the bottom of the
pool and brought little Stephanie up to the deck. Her face was blue, and she
had no pulse and was not breathing. Butler immediately went to work performing
CPR to revive her while Stephanie's mother telephoned the fire department. She
was told the paramedics were already out on a call. Helplessly, she sobbed and
hugged Butler's shoulders.
As Butler continued with his CPR, he calmly reassured
her." Don't worry," he said. "I was her arms to get out of the
pool. It'll be okay. I am now her lungs. Together we can make it." Seconds later the little girl coughed,
regained consciousness, and began to cry.
As they hugged and rejoiced together the mother asked
Butler how he knew it would be okay.
"The truth is, I didn't know." he told her.
"But when my legs were blown off in the war, I was all alone in a field.
No one was there to help me except a little Vietnamese girl. As she struggled
to drag me into her village, she whispered in broken English, "It's okay.
You live. I be your legs. Together
we make it." Her kind words brought hope in my soul and I wanted to do the
same for Stephanie."
There are simply those times when we cannot stand
alone. There are those times when we need Someone to be our legs, arms, and our
Friend.
"There is a friend that sticketh closer than a
brother" - the Lord Jesus Christ, and He always has time for us.
