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Mina Raky, his wife and four kids escaped their Florida home when it caught fire on the morning of Dec. 2

"We lost everything. It's a big trauma," Raky tells PEOPLE

Still, he says "when you look at the whole scenario, you see that God's hand surrounded us"

A Florida family says they're lucky to be alive after their house caught on fire.

Mina Raky, a married school teacher and dad of 4, tells PEOPLE he slept late as he was finishing his final paper for his Ph.D on Tuesday, Dec. 2.

He usually puts on noise canceling headphones when he sleeps, but he didn’t that particular early morning, which allowed him to hear popping noises from outside his two-story home in Sanford around 5 a.m. local time. “That was the first miracle,” he says.

Right away, Raky says his first thought

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