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Bob Hatmaker stepped up first. He placed both hands on the hood of the van and leaned in. Zoe Anne's husband, Roy, a pastor, and the couple's daughter, Hilary, a petite high school junior, lined up alongside the van. Mike Matula, Jordan and Heather Thomson and Scott Beatty jumped in too. Together, the group began to push. But the van just wouldn't budge.Zoe Anne knelt down across from Grace and began reciting the Lord's Prayer. Grace joined in. Within seconds, the van started rising. Several more people -- Wendell Gentry, Hung and Nhung Nguyen and others -- laid their hands on the vehicle and bore down. The van rose higher still.
"Thy will be done," Grace and Zoe Anne said aloud, and as the prayer continued, Jonathan began, with ragged gasps, to suck in air. His pulse returned with such strength that Grace's fingers were pushed off his neck.
"He's breathing! He's got a pulse!" Grace shouted. "Keep going!"
But the van, now leaking sudsy water, wouldn't move any more. Heather grabbed a length of the downed lamp post and tried to use it as a lever to lift the back of the van. Spotting his sister struggling, Jordan yelled, "Heather, bring it over here!"
Sliding the post under the vehicle, Jordan and others pushed with every bit of their strength. Although they had to fight to keep the post from slipping on the wet, soapy pavement, the van lifted another foot.
Capt. Lionel McPeters of the Fresno Fire Department was among the first of the emergency personnel to arrive. His training had taught him to not utilize untrained civilians in rescues. But he quickly realized these people had just saved a man's life. "Hold it steady," he encouraged the group.
It took rescue workers 10 minutes to extricate Stewart. Finally McPeters ordered everyone to let go, and the van slid down with a creaking sigh.
All told, they had lifted the vehicle some 18 inches off the ground and held it for 20 minutes -- maybe longer. Moments later, most of the good Samaritans were gone. Jonathan Stewart suffered a torn aorta, a collapsed lung and more than a dozen broken bones, including his skull and several vertebrae. But despite that, he was going to live, thanks to a bunch of strangers who stopped that day to deliver a late Christmas present -- his life.
Ship of Miracles
Jennifer Goldblatt
Adapted from The New York Times
Benedict Ahn is excited, intense, a man with a vision. Though he wasn't yet born during the Korean War, the businessman is on a mission. On the grounds of a monastery in New Jersey, Ahn plans to build a monument to Korean-American friendship -- and to a supply ship, the Meredith Victory. Why this ship? Why there? Why now? Therein lies a story, and perhaps a miracle -- or a double miracle -- that unfolds over 50 years.
On a freezing December night in 1950, six months after the outbreak of the war, Leonard LaRue, skipper of the supply freighter Meredith Victory, with 300 tons of jet fuel in the hold and combat raging all around, took his ship into the port of Hungnam, 135 miles north of the 38th parallel. Thousands of Chinese troops had poured into North Korea to aid the Communists. And over 90,000 peasants fled south to escape them -- across freezing mountain roads, down to a burning city under bombardment.
Desperate, the refugees waded into the water, clambering onto the docks and aboard any boat that would take them. Leonard LaRue took them. And took them -- lowering thousands into the holds on wooden pallets. Frightened refugees were packed shoulder to shoulder. As the Chinese closed in, the ship steamed out under fire just two days before Christmas with 14,000 on board. Despite a lack of food, fresh water and heat in the holds, not a life was lost during the three-day journey to Koje-do Island. In fact, five babies were born aboard by Christmas Day.
Captain LaRue won international acclaim. But with his lifelong faith confirmed by the extraordinary adventure, he withdrew from the clamor and entered St. Paul's Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in New Jersey, as Brother Marinus.
When he arrived, the abbey was flourishing. Fifty monks ran a boarding school, a retreat center, a camp and a Christmas tree farm. And as he hoped, the abbey gave him peace.
The '60s, however, brought revolutionary cultural changes inside and outside the church.
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