GOD IN THE WHIRLWIND ! by Gorman Woodfin.

"I am so afraid of tornadoes to begin with. I grew up being afraid of them. My dad was afraid of them. It’s always been a huge fear of mine," says Kim Bernhardt. Kim is a loving single mom with a playful 4-year-old son, Evan. One day, while running errands around town, Kim says the skies grew strangely dark. Kim and Evan came face to face with a level 3 tornado.

"At first I accelerated really hard when it first hit us, thinking, I’m going to drive out of this. I can get out of this. And I couldn’t. I was just stuck." Kim desperately tried to get to her church, but the twister was already upon her and it would not let her turn into the church parking lot.

"We should have been killed upon impact," she says. "It just picked us up and carried us. Then we started being raised up more, being swept more, turning. Then I see it’s going up more and more to where we’re up toward the top of the houses, where I’m looking down to the side and seeing houses just literally being sucked apart. I saw the shingles flying off. I saw the roofs just totally being taken off."

Kim had no idea how dangerously high in the air they were.

Candace Shelton was an eyewitness that fateful afternoon. She says that Kim’s van was about 50 feet in the air—over power lines. She saw a white van "flying" in the air from her second-floor window.

"Things were blowing around everywhere, and then there’s a telephone pole over here, and I saw a white van that was up in the air above the telephone pole. It was just as if you take like a little toy car and you set it in your hand and you hold it up in the air. It was just like someone had it held in the palm of their hand," says Candice.

In the midst of her unbelievable ordeal, Kim’s thoughts were focused solely on the safety of her son.

"The darkest moment was when I looked back at Evan and had that thought of what if I live and Evan is killed?" Kim recalls. "I imagined his head being mutilated by debris. I remember loosening my seatbelt, and the next thing I knew, I was embracing him, telling him, 'God is with us.'"

Then Kim began praying a familiar prayer while she was shielding her son on the floor of their van.

"When I went above that house and was praying the Lord’s Prayer, right when I was at the part 'Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,' this other overwhelming thought came to my mind: 'Oh, no! I don’t think I put the van in park!' I reached up and put the van in park," Kim explains. " I got right back down over Evan. The van is still going sideways and moving around, and I’m like, Why did I do that? I couldn’t understand why I thought putting the van in park was going to help in a tornado." … Read more here!