HER ARMS…

HER ARMS…

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 that 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; 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 shoulder.

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 except a little Vietnamese girl.
As she struggled to drag me into her village, she whispered in broken English,
'It okay. You can live. I be your legs. Together we make it'”.
Her kind words brought hope to 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, our arms, our friend.
- Author Unknown








We have all struggled with hard times at one time or another in our lives
and one thing is universal in those hardships; we have all learned from
and became stronger because of that trial or tribulation that we went through.

It is important now that we use the negative that once brought us pain
and turn it around for good for the betterment of others.
We can use the hardship that we went through to comfort someone else
who may be going through a similar situation and extend the light that is within us
to ease the hurt and pain of that one going through the hardship.

Never think that you can’t use the past to bring comfort
to someone else in this present time because if we allow Him to,
God will use our past to benefit others in ways
that we have never imagined or thought possible. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)

I hope you are blessed and encouraged by today's message to see that no matter
what you went through in the past; you still have the ability to use that trial
to bring help and blessing to someone in need of it.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God,
to them who are the called according to His purpose.”-- Romans 8:28