A house fire in Fresno, California on Saturday was caught on video, and an image of Jesus Christ seen in a plume of smoke has many convinced that it was a sign from God that everyone was safe.
The video starts out with a woman screaming that there's a man still inside the duplex while the fire blares and smoke billows. Good Samaritan neighbors rush in and are seen carrying the man to safety, just in front of the camera. But it's the plume of smoke that erupted just before the rescue enters the frame that seems to show an image of Jesus above the scene.
"You see Jesus in the smoke, and then the person gets saved. That's, that right there's not a coincidence," said Wyatt Forker, a witness to the fire. Wyatt and his brother, Dillon, live just down the street from where the fire happened and were excited to see the image when shown footage of Saturday's fire.
But Monsignor Raymond Dreiling with the Catholic Diocese of Fresno said the image may be just a coincidence, but he's hopeful that it's a sign from God. "Is that God speaking to us? In a specific way, no. But, for people of faith, we can say, this is a hint for us," the Monsignor said to Fresno's KSEE News in an interview.
Dreiling said he does believe God was watching over the scene. "The true face of God, the true image of God, was the man carrying his neighbor out on his shoulders," he said.
Thankfully, no one was injured in the fire, which leads even more to believe that the image of Jesus at that exact moment of rescue was a sign.
The Fresno Fire Department's public information officier Koby Johns commented that the rescued occupants were lucky. "The odds are dead set against you if you try to go into a burning structure, whether there's fire or if it's just smoke," he said to KSEE. "The smoke is what's gonna get you before the fire."
KSEE comments that, no matter what you may see in the smoke, the important part of this story is that no one was hurt, thanks to the actions of a brave soul who went in and grabbed that man out of harm's way.
"That's the lesson, the most profound lesson we take from this," said Dreiling.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
