Innholdsfortegnelse for April - May 2015 i Mysterious Ways

Have you ever felt that your mother can read your mind? Well, maybe not read your mind but have some sort of sixth sense about you? My mom was like that. She was both a worrier and an optimist, which might seem paradoxical. Except I think deep down she believed that the more she worried about something—especially something about me, since I was not an easy kid—the more likely the outcome would be positive. Call it preventive worrying. But sometimes it was just plain spooky. I remember visiting her once in Michigan and going for a very long walk after dinner, as was my wont. It was dark by the time I got back. Mom, standing on the porch: “I was just trying to decide whether we should bury you…

By Kay Miller, COPLEY, OHIO Click! My eyes flew open. It was pitch black inside the camper shell, a moonless night in the Honduran mountains. Someone—or something—was out there! I shook my husband, Dave, awake. “Honey, what was that?” I whispered. “Probably just an animal,” he said groggily. “Who knows what lives out here.” He fished a flashlight from his pack and shined it out the tiny window. “See? Nothing.” He fell back asleep. I tossed and turned in the steamy heat, pleading with God to give me peace of mind. Was it just my fear of the unknown? Dave and I had traveled to the small mountain village of San Luis in the wake of Hurricane Fifi to help relief efforts alongside our missionary friend Gary. With limited space…

Paris, France, 1662. A great man had died, one of the greatest mathematicians and scientists of his age, and his servant was going through his clothes one last time. Folding a doublet, he felt something in the lining. It made a crinkling sound, like paper. He snipped a seam and removed a piece of parchment. Wrapped inside was a faded scrap of paper with notes scrawled on it. The servant recognized the handwriting. His master had written thousands of pages on arcane topics. But these two pieces of paper held an answer to a greater question, the heart of who Blaise Pascal was and a night that changed him forever. Pascal defied expectations at a young age. He devised mathematical proofs as a teenager, including one that so astounded Descartes…

Dayton, Ohio Seven-year-old Hunter Samworth was a huge fan of the minor league Dayton Dragons, especially their team mascot, Heater. Even if he couldn’t hear the crack of the bat or the roar of the crowd. Hunter is deaf, and communicates using sign language. According to the Dayton Daily News, one Saturday, Hunter’s parents took him to a game. As soon as the boy walked into the stadium, he ran to the dragon mascot and signed “hello.” Heater replied…in American Sign Language, asking Hunter if he liked baseball. Hunter signed back that he loved baseball and Heater. “To have someone who was able to communicate with him…was amazing,” Hunter’s dad told the News. How many of the team’s mascots were trained in ASL? Only the actor playing Heater that day,…

Body armor. Advanced combat helmets. Steel cladding. These things keep our soldiers safe. You might find it odd, then, to suggest that a book could serve as a shield. Marksmen have demonstrated that a hardcover tome can’t stop anything more powerful than a .22 caliber. Yet soldiers have experienced the lifesaving power of Bibles on the battlefield as far back as the First English Civil War, in 1643, when a young Parliamentarian escaped a battle unscathed only to find a lead slug wedged in the 16-page pamphlet of Bible verses in his vest pocket. The Good Book has saved lives in warfare—and we have the pictures to prove it. The American Civil War The American Bible Society distributed pocket-sized New Testaments to fighters on both sides of the conflict, most…

I made my way through the underground market in Shanghai, trying to squeeze past haggling bargain-hunters and stalls of silk scarves, wood carvings and purses of every size. I’d swapped flights with another flight attendant at the last minute to be here, hoping I could find something special to bring home. I did that a lot on my layovers. In fact, the best purchase I’d made had been from China three months earlier: a pair of teal crystal earrings that matched my favorite necklace. I’d found them in a shop in Beijing. But I lost one. I couldn’t find it in any of my bags. It’d probably fallen out in an airport somewhere—anywhere—given my global travel. I couldn’t bear to toss the orphaned one, though. I still carried it in…

Expecting I wanted, no, needed a poppy-seed muffin—it didn’t matter that I was running late for work. Five months pregnant, when those cravings hit, I couldn’t ignore them. I drove down the road that passes my favorite coffee shop, glanced out the window and sighed. A line of customers spilled onto the sidewalk. My poppy-seed muffin would have to wait. I made it to the office just in time and settled in at my desk, wishing I could satisfy the rumbling in my belly. Just then, a woman from the business next door strolled into our reception area with a giant pink cake box. “Our office wanted to bless you guys this morning with breakfast treats,” she said. “Take your pick!” She opened the box and revealed a bunch of…

Boarding my train at the station, dressed in a sleeveless white top and my favorite blue skirt, I felt like a million bucks. It was my day off from my job as a ticket agent for United Airlines, and I was traveling from Manhattan to visit my friend Cynthia in Stony Brook, Long Island. I settled by a window and closed my eyes as other passengers filed in and took their seats. The train pulled out, and soon its gentle rocking had put me into a drowsy trance. All at once, I saw a vision of myself covered with blood, streaks of crimson blotting my white top. I tried to move. My limbs were frozen. I looked around the car for help, but everyone just stayed put in their seats.…

Mariano Rivera’s first baseball was a rock wrapped in fishing net and tape. His glove was a flattened milk carton. Growing up in a tin-roofed house in a tiny Panamanian fishing village, he gave little hint that one day, he’d be the greatest closer in baseball history. At 18 he was earning 50 dollars a week on a fishing boat, playing various positions for a local team. One game, the manager thrust Mariano into emergency relief. “I got results that were way beyond my physical abilities,” Mariano writes in his autobiography, The Closer. That same year, he’d begun studying Scripture at the urging of a cousin. Two years later, the New York Yankees signed Mariano to a minor league contract. He was a fringe prospect, with an underwhelming 87-mph fastball.…

The Sign Kaboom! My husband and I bolted upright. “What was that?” I asked. It was 3:00 a.m. Freezing rain pelted our bedroom window. The wind howled. “I think a tree just fell on our house,” my husband said. Our home was surrounded by trees, some 50 feet tall. A fallen one could cause major damage. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” I shouted, the only prayer I could muster. I flung off the covers. We raced from room to room. Everything looked okay, but I dreaded seeing the kitchen, which had etched-glass entry doors and a breakfast nook with lots of windows. Judging from the sound we’d awakened to, the impact would have shattered them all. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…” Through the nook’s windows, we could see a massive tree leaning against our…

My mom isn’t a doctor. She’s not a scientist. In fact, biology was her worst subject in school. She gets squeamish around blood, and hospitals make her nervous. Yet she was the one who challenged a physician’s diagnosis and saved me from a puzzling illness. I’ve often wondered how she could know something my doctor didn’t. Is there really such a thing as “mother’s intuition?” As it turns out, a number of researchers believe stories like mine are just the tip of the iceberg. In eighth grade, I began experiencing headaches and nausea. I was exhausted, but couldn’t sleep. My eyes felt funny. My pediatrician ordered test after test. Nothing appeared to be off. He assured my parents that I was just a normal teenager, probably overexerting myself. My mom…

For days on end, Taras Pavlovsky pored over the markings and symbols, an arrangement of tiny black dots and strokes that Slavic monks had set on paper hundreds of years before. Musical notation, a guide to the chants the monks sang every day to glorify God. To most people the markings were indecipherable. Few had ever figured out a translation. Why go to the trouble? But what others saw as a pointless dive into obscurity, Pavlovsky saw as a fascinating quest. He was a musi-cian himself—the bandura, a lute-like folk instrument, was his favorite—and after college he had taken a job as a choir director, later a cantor, at a Ukrainian Orthodox Church in New Jersey, a cathedral with icons illuminated by the light filtering through its leaded-glass windows. He…