WHAT? HOW?

In 1952, in Ritter, Oregon, Mrs. Parkins sends her three young children out back to play in the barn. She later calls them to dinner and the two older children come back to the house. She asks where their 2-year old brother Keith was and they tell her that he left the barn just a little while before she called them.



She goes to the barn, but Keith isn't there. It's the dead of winter, snow is on the ground. Keith is wearing his jacket, but it won't be sufficient for such weather when the sun goes down. He isn't equipped to spend the night outside.

His family and a local search party began looking for him immediately. They found his footprints in the snow going away from the barn. They followed them up to a point before they completely stopped. His were the only tracks. There were no animal or adult tracks or any tracks of any kind nearby. The boy's footprints just stopped. The night came and went.

Nineteen hours later, they found Keith. He was 12 miles away, lying facedown in the snow on a frozen pond. The searcher who had found him called for Mr. Parkins who was nearby. He ran over to the pond. He rolled his son over, picked him up, and saw that Keith was alive.

To get to where he was, the toddler had to have traversed through barbed wire (his jacket was cut in several places) and gone the 12 miles, at night, pitch dark, in the snow and ice, then survived the night without his jacket. When they asked him why he had run away and how he survived, he said he didn’t remember.

Later, a survival expert and former police officer attempted to do the same thing as Keith, walking alone at night in the dark in the snow and ice. He said that he couldn’t see a foot in front of him and he had to stop. The journey would require the toddler to venture over two mountain ranges, as well as fences, creeks, and rivers. He demonstrated that what Keith had done, a two-year-old walking 12 miles in that weather for that distance, then surviving the night, was impossible.

Keith Parkins, now an adult, remembers nothing about that night. No one is exactly sure how Keith survived. His mother kept what he was wearing. Keith has the articles of clothing.

How do you explain those 19 hours? Guardian angels? Why did the footprints abruptly stop? How did a toddler get that far? How did the child survive? It remains a mystery.

We live with mysteries. “The greatest mystery of all revealed truth is confronted [in the Trinity]. Mere difficulty in conceiving what is peculiar and befitting the Infinite One should offer no objection to a doctrine based on revelation. The nature of God must present mysteries to the finite mind, and the triune mode of existence is perhaps the supreme mystery. . . In approaching the theme of the Trinity, the student may well be prepared to confront a deep mystery which, of necessity, is not explained to finite minds.” (Lewis Sperry Chafer)

Dr. Robert South wrote: “As he that denies it  [the doctrine of the Trinity] may lose his soul; so he that too much strives to understand it may lose his wits.”