Innholdsfortegnelse for August - September 2016 i Mysterious Ways

On page 42 of this issue, you’ll find a feature we hope will become a staple of Mysterious Ways—powerful words of wonder from a venerated thinker, transformed by an artist into an illuminating work of art. For our first one, we’ve quoted our company’s founder Norman Vincent Peale. “All of the universe is in vibration,” Dr. Peale wrote. “The air is filled with vibrations. The reaction between human beings is also in vibration.” When we pray, we “awaken vibrations in the universe through which God brings to pass the good objectives prayed for.” Dr. Peale couldn’t have known, back in 1952, that science would come to agree with him, at least in part. String theory, developed in the late 1960s, postulates that atoms are made up of tiny strings. The…

First thing every morning, I settle myself on the sofa in our TV room, the cat at my feet, and sink into 20 minutes of prayer. I’ve had all sorts of mentors over the years, taking inspiration wherever I find it, but I would never have thought it would come from a wildly passionate, vision-seeing fourteenth-century Italian saint. I’ve never lain in an ecstatic trance, never received stigmata, never had a near-death experience like Catherine of Siena, but I have seen in her what it is to seek and find God’s love in the mystery of prayer. Everything about Catherine is over the top. I’m reminded of that line of Mae West’s, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” Catherine, in her brief life, seemed to chase after…

AWARA: I stared in disbelief at the computer in the internet café. My husband, Ernesto, and I were with our two teenage daughters in Lima, Peru, 3,000 miles from our home in North Carolina. This was the final stage of our journey to adopt two boys from an orphanage in the Amazon rain forest. We had promised to update our families and friends, who had walked so much of the long and difficult road with us. If only our calls could go through, especially to my mom. Before we left home, I had contacted our cell-phone provider to be sure we were set to send and receive calls from the States. But when we arrived in Peru we discovered that our international calling function had not been enabled. We were…

Life jackets. Fire extinguishers. Seat belts. Safety labels. These things help save lives. But danger can be unpredictable, and so can the ways that people are unexpectedly protected. …Soda Machine This past March, a FedEx driver named Kyra Johnson pulled up to a hardware store in Paincourtville, Louisiana, to make a delivery—just before an EF3 tornado with 135-mile-an-hour winds touched down. Kyra ran to the store, only to find it locked; the employees were huddled in the bathrooms. No one heard her cries for help. She looked frantically for shelter. All she saw was a soda machine. Kyra wedged herself behind it. Seconds later, the tornado hit. The building was demolished, but the soda machine stood fast and shielded Kyra from the deadly flying debris. She and the store employees…

The island pulled us in. It wasn’t where we wanted to go, yet we couldn’t escape it. Fierce winds and strong currents drew us closer and closer like an unseen force. I tinkered with the dead engine of our 16-foot aluminum fishing boat while Mike, my brother-in-law, struggled to steer us through the choppy water with the one paddle we had on board. He stopped suddenly. “Jon, you hear that?” I listened. A distant buzz. I looked up. A small plane flew overhead. “Help!” we shouted. Mike dropped the paddle, took off his white shirt and waved it wildly. But the plane flew on, not even a dip of its wings to indicate we’d been seen. Mike and I sank back down in the boat. We were exhausted. Out of…

The dreams began when I was in my forties. I saw myself caring for a baby girl, lifting her from her crib, helping her take her first steps. I awoke confused. I was single, not even dating. I didn’t want kids. I pushed the dreams out of my mind. One day at the office where I worked as an accountant, a coworker said, “Guess what I dreamed last night? You told us you were pregnant, and we threw you a baby shower!” I forced myself to smile and said, “Well, that’s certainly a crazy dream.” Two years later, my niece, Pamela, told me she’d seen me holding a little girl in a dream. The child’s eyes and smile were just like mine. “You’ve got quite the imagination,” I said, changing…

There’s a cool new way to get your kicks on Route 66. Travelers leaving Albuquerque, New Mexico, can turn off their radios and be serenaded by the mother road itself. The “musical highway” between Mile Markers 4 and 5 was dreamed up by the New Mexico Department of Transportation as a way to get drivers to slow down while livening up a monotonous stretch of road. Rumble strips were placed at precise intervals so that when cars drive over them at the speed limit, the vibrations sound like musical notes. All will recognize the classic tune: “America the Beautiful.”…

Montecristi, Ecuador On April 16, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck near the Ecuadoran town of Mon-tecristi. As the ground shook, the congregants assembling for Saturday evening Mass at Our Mother of Monserrate ran for their lives. The centuries-old basilica’s bell tower collapsed. A statue of Saint Peter split in two. When the tremors finally stopped, the townspeople gathered amid the rubble to look for a sign of hope—like the threefoot-tall Virgin Mary statue that gave the church its name. According to The New York Times, the sixteenth-century statue had survived pirate raids and other attempts to remove it. It served as a rallying point for the faithful during times of persecution. A cancer patient credited the Virgin with a cure. Other people said she’d saved them from a landslide. But it…

Bonjour. It’s me. The French-Canadian woman you robbed on Lepage Avenue in Dorval, on July 4, 2012, at one o’clock in the morning. You might not remember me. I would understand if you don’t. It was very dark and you were very tense. But as for me, I will never forget you. Or your voice, which roused me from a deep, deep slumber. “Get up and get me your money and jewelry!” you barked. You were standing at the foot of my bed. Tall, skinny, dressed in head-to-toe black and that ridiculous Scream ghost-face mask (really, where does one buy an outfit like that?). You had my 80-year-old husband, Walter, in a headlock. That got me mad. I’m sure you didn’t know it—how could you?—but Walter was in the early…

The wild horses were magnificent. I stood among the herd, stroking their long, flowing manes. Everything was so peaceful in this pasture. Flowers swayed in the breeze. I turned around. A group of strangers was behind me. No one spoke, but they radiated love and joy. Where was this place? Gerry. I woke up with my friend’s name on my mind. The dream I’d just had—for some reason, I needed to tell her about it. Gerry came into my life when my husband and I moved to Louisiana. I was unsure if we would fit in at our new church. Gerry was the first to greet us. She was in her mid-fifties then, and had just announced she was free of colon cancer. She introduced me to everyone at church,…

The two had little in common. A 93-year-old former Olympic runner, World War II prisoner of war and born-again Christian, and a 35-year-old Oscar-winning actress, humanitarian, tabloid cover girl and former wild child. But for Louis Zamperini and Angelina Jolie, those differences were no barrier to a friendship that became a testament. Angelina was between projects when she read Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken, detailing Louis’s athletic career, his survival in a brutal Japanese POW camp, his struggle with alcoholism and his ultimate path to finding God. Hoping to turn the book into a movie, Angelina made contact, and was shocked to find that Louis lived nearby. As she told the Today show, she was at home thinking, “I wanna do something important.… I need some help. I need some guidance.…

I pushed my grocery cart through the housewares department at Fry’s Food and Drug, not quite ready to check out. Only three weeks till Christmas and I was feeling blue. Most years, my husband, Nick, and I spent money on decorations and gifts for our grown kids and their kids. But Nick’s company had gone out of business and he’d taken a lower-paying job. This Christmas would have to be on a shoestring. The kids were understanding, but I still wanted to get them something. I hoped to find some odds and ends for gifts, maybe cute tins for cookies. The more I searched, though, the worse I felt. Nothing seemed gift-worthy. I was ready to call it quits when I saw it: Weekly Special: Only $3! Under-neath the sign…

Denis O’Brien It was as if the car were driving itself and I was just along for the ride. At 8:30 on a Sunday night I was on I-684, heading south to Manhattan after a weekend Upstate. Suddenly I was struck by the irresistible urge to go see my elderly father in Nyack, New York. Dad was probably already in bed, but I turned west and traveled 20 miles, crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge and arrived at his house. I parked and saw my dad’s neighbor outside. “You just missed him,” he said. Missed him? “The ambulance came,” the neighbor explained. “He had a heart attack. I thought you knew.” I sped to the hospital. Dad was okay, but he was surprised at how quickly I’d reached him. “Who called…