With no time to find a ladder, a couple of quick-thinking neighbors did the next best thing. One stood on the other’s shoulders and pulled Jacky through the window “just as the roof fell into the chamber [his room],” Susanna reports.
His improbable rescue was quickly declared a miracle.
“I could not believe it,” his father wrote a week after the fire, “till I had kissed him two or three times.”
While the family lost nearly every possession they had, they all were saved. John Wesley remembers his father calling out from the garden as the fire continued to consume the family home, “Come, Neighbours! Let us kneel down! Let us give thanks to God! He has given me all my eight Children: let the house go: I am rich enough!”
The fire was not God’s will, but by God’s grace all had survived.
After the fire, Susanna sometimes referred to her Jacky as a brand plucked from the burning, a reference to Zechariah 3:2. She believed God saved her young son for a reason, a lesson Jacky learned well.
Nearly 45 years later, Wesley remembered his mother’s words. Lying in bed sick with consumption—a generic term used at the time for any illness that caused a person to waste away—Wesley wrote an epitaph for himself to be used if he didn’t recover.
The would-be inscription he penned in his journal began, “Here lieth the body of John Wesley, a brand plucked out of the burning” (November 26, 1753). (Wesley lived another 37 years and this epitaph was not used.)
It’s #ThrowbackThursday and we’re looking back at an event in February 1709 that changed the course of John Wesley’s life. Check it out and see if you’ve heard this bit of history before. #UMCHistory https://t.co/ga7Po5iWBZ pic.twitter.com/LhT1oP55aU
— The United Methodist Church (@UMChurch) February 7, 2019