Miracle in Tennessee: Baby Whirled Away as Tornado Destroys Home - Ten Minutes Later, They Looked in a Tree and Knew God Was at Work
One family’s night during a hellish Tennessee tornado went from tragic to miraculous in a matter of minutes.
On Saturday, Dec. 9, a devastating tornado touched down in Clarksville, Tennessee, killing 3, injuring about 62 people and leaving hundreds homeless.
Among the victims of this tornado were a young couple, Sydney Moore, 22, and her boyfriend, Aramis Youngblood. The two of them were in their mobile home with their sons, one-year-old Princeton and four-month-old Lord, when the tornado struck, WZTV-TV reported.
As Moore told the local news station, it began with Youngblood hearing a sound like that of an airplane. Just before the tornado sirens sounded, the walls began to shake.
Moore told WSMV-TV, “Something in me just told me to run and jump on top of my son. Literally the moment I jumped on him, the walls collapsed.” As the tornado funnel touched down in their living room, Youngblood lunged for the bassinet containing the sleeping Lord.
Unfortunately, as Moore said, the baby “was the first thing to go up.” Youngblood managed to grab the bassinet, only to be spun around and eventually hurled to the ground by the tornado’s force.
“He was just holding on to the bassinet the whole time, and they went into circles, he said, and then they got thrown,” Moore said.
By the time the horrific ordeal had ended, nothing was left of their trailer but piles of debris. Moore managed to pull herself and Princeton out from underneath a collapsed wall.
She managed to find her boyfriend, who had suffered a broken collarbone in the chaos.
But for around 10 minutes, Lord was nowhere to be found.
“We were screaming for each other,” she told WSMV. “I just remember asking, ‘Where’s my baby!’ and my child’s father said he didn’t know.”
They feared the worst.
“I thought he was dead,” Moore said. “I was pretty sure he was dead and we weren’t going to find him.”
A few yards from their home, however, they saw something in a fallen tree.
Lying there, in the pouring rain, was baby Lord — almost, as his mother said, as if he had been placed there. “It had to have been God.”
Baby swept away in Tennessee tornado found alive ‘by the grace of God’ in unusual spot https://t.co/GtFhVQGM0a pic.twitter.com/bPM8DN6mZG
— New York Post (@nypost) December 16, 2023
Miraculously, the child had only minor injuries.
“All he had was a gash on the side of his face, ” Moore told WZTV.
Though the family is still in dire straights, bereft of their home and all their earthly possessions, nevertheless they were spared the unfathomable tragedy of losing their baby son.
Even despite their now utter lack of any material belongings, Moore could only express gratitude for finding the baby alive and well, telling WSMV she and Youngblood would “die for our kids. That’s not even a question.”
How many of us would have the same response to such a disaster as did Moore and Youngblood? Would we express our gratitude for our family’s survival, or would we focus more on the loss of our material goods?
As parents, Moore and Youngblood have their priorities in exactly the right place: Not only would they willingly sacrifice their lives for their children, but, having faced the real possibility of losing their baby, they credit their child’s survival to the grace of God, and remain grateful to Him that the entire family survived the ordeal with only a few injuries.
Material possessions and earthly belongings are temporary and fleeting. As this young family learned, you can lose everything you own in an instant. Our families, however, are irreplaceable.
As this story shows us, evidence of God’s grace and God’s mercy is everywhere, even in the midst of unthinkable disasters. Maybe, as we enter the Christmas season, that’s something we would all do well to remember.
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