The miracle of my business resurrection happened in August 1999. My two brothers and I operate a chain of furniture retail stores, importing furniture from all over the world, and business was generally good. However, a major crisis took place that fateful August morning when a blazing inferno engulfed our goods, office, warehouse and all our valuable documents.

After the big burnout, I gazed helplessly at the ruins of the smoldering skeleton of my 18,000-square-feet warehouse and office. There seemed to be nothing left for us to salvage. While I thanked God for His mercy that no one had been injured or killed in the fire, I was totally devastated by the scale of the damage and the speed with which the flames wreaked destruction.

Although I had recently bought an insurance policy with a new insurance company, I was very worried by the thought that the amount covered might still not be enough to cover the immense losses that resulted from the fire. After a quick meeting with the insurance company, the situation looked totally unfavorable and bleak to us. All the ledgers and financial papers that accounted for all our goods lay burnt and buried under the mountainous heap of ashes.

Without sufficient compensation from the insurance company to cover our losses, our cash flow would be crippled, thus preventing us from being able to re-order goods to stock our eight retail outlets and resume selling.

The Power of Prayer

From my days as a child, I believed in the power of prayer. So together with my brothers and their church pastors and members, we prayed over the burnt site.

The next day as we rumbled through the ruins spiritlessly, we found our burnt and blackened safe. We opened it only to find it full of ashes and some badly burnt documents. The records did not survive the heat of the fire and whatever hope we had for the documents in the safe was quickly extinguished.

The situation looked hopeless and we were preparing ourselves for the fact that we were facing huge and critical financial losses. This was by far the biggest and most challenging crisis we had faced during the years of building up the business.

We were facing what appeared to be inevitable ruin, but we continued to pray faithfully and kept believing God for a miracle.

A Miracle from Heaven

The next day, we carried on our perfunctory search through the huge heaps of ashes. It was like looking for the proverbial needle in a huge, black haystack. Unbelievably, as we raked through the ashes, we found two badly burnt financial books buried deep under a pile of rubble. And as we flipped through the blackened pages, there we found our miracle!

There were a few pages that had survived the inferno sufficiently for us to see the financial records clearly. Incredibly, the crucially important pages were only singed along the edge. Those pages were exactly the valuable evidence and figures that we needed to validate our claim for compensation by the insurance company.

Somehow we knew that this had to be totally supernatural because everything else was burnt to a cinder! Even quite a sizeable part of my Mercedes Benz, which was parked next to the warehouse, had also melted and needed to be written off. So intense was the heat of the fire that no one could rationally expect anything to survive.

Yet the vital pages of our financial records—which were exactly what we needed for our insurance claim—miraculously survived the disastrous fire. On one of these important pages, we saw a faint imprint of a palm across the page, as though a hand had been laid on it to protect it from the fiery inferno.

Supernatural Favor

At the same time, God also granted us favor with all our principals and suppliers. They responded promptly and positively to our desperate situation by giving us top priority, working overtime to manufacture and deliver our goods urgently. With their kind support, we were able to resume our retail business quickly without suffering more operational losses.

What seemed like the end of the road for us had been turned around by God's grace, and our business was resurrected and back on track in the shortest possible time. To this day, the two partly-burnt pages from our financial records, one with that mysterious hand print, remain with us as visible reminders of God's miracle-working power.

The warehouse fire reminded me of the verse in Daniel where God miraculously protected the three Hebrew children—Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—from the blazing furnace that king Nebuchanezzar threw them into. I also felt encouraged as I read Ezra 7:28 (NLV) which says, "I felt encouraged because the gracious hand of the Lord my God was on us ..." God had protected us and sustained our business in the midst of what looked like our worst company crisis.

Unexpected events can hit anyone, anytime, anywhere, without the slightest warning, but our Lord has proven to us that His saving grace is always ready and available to those who believe in His mercy, faithfulness and unfailing love.