Bernard Gilpin. A broken leg saved him from death at the stake.
Ken Curtis, founder of Vision Video and Christian History Institute, was once delayed in catching a train to London’s Heathrow Airport. Friends kindly drove him to his destination. This may have saved him from death or injury. The subway he was to have taken was one of those hit by suicide bombers. What seemed to be an inconvenience proved to be a blessing.
How often we read of such events. A woman misses her plane: it is involved in the terrible crash on Tinerife. Augustine of Hippo gets lost traveling to a church he has not visited before; the confusion proves God-directed—Donatists were lying in ambush for him. Bernard Gilpin breaks his leg and is unable to fulfill Queen Mary’s summons; she dies before he is able to move, and so he eludes death at the stake. Viktor Frankl misses his truck, and escapes a last-minute massacre of Jews by Germans. Perhaps we should not rail at inconveniences; sometimes they are God’s way of prolonging our lives.
Jesus knew about that. Both as an infant and as a man, God had to preserve his life from murderers, for “his time had not yet come.”