At 3:09 a.m. on July 27 Chaplain Stephen Pike was sound asleep inside Camp Fallujah, Iraq. At 3:10 a.m. he was awakened by a loud thud and then realized he was “three feet above the bed and parallel to it.”

The 47-year-old Episcopal priest, a Navy commander from Louisville, Ky., serving with the First Marine Division, learned later that it was a 107 mm. rocket fired from about three miles away that had buried itself in the ground under the trailer where he slept.

“It missed the corner of the trailer where the head of my bed is by three inches,” he told Defend America, a U.S. Department of Defense internet publication. Chaplain Pike was later informed that the type of ordnance fired at his trailer reliably detonates.

That it did not detonate on impact has mystified his colleagues, with some calling it a miracle.

“God preserved my life for some reason that I’ve yet to discover,” he said. “It just wasn’t my time to die, which I say with all humility because I’ve worked with so many wonderful young men at Bravo Medical whose time it was to die. Why they died and why I live, I don’t know. But I do know God is ultimately in charge of all things.”