Innholdsfortegnelse for June - July 2018 i Mysterious Ways

A sign in the window of a children’s bookstore in my neighborhood reads: Stories Can Change the World. There is, perhaps, no truer sign in all of New York City. Stories can change the world. They can change us. Science has proof. Neuroscientist Uri Hasson uses fMRIs to study the impact of “natural real life events” on the brain. Like telling stories. Dr. Hasson’s research shows that when people listen to unrehearsed, true stories, their brain’s activity actually syncs up with the storyteller’s. Amazing, right? Stories can also affect our brain chemistry. According to Carmine Gallo, author of The Storyteller’s Secret, “When the brain hears a compelling personal story, it triggers a rush of chemicals including dopamine, cortisol and oxytocin, the ‘love molecule’ that makes us feel empathy for another…

Ever have a weird dream you just can’t shake? I’m a college student and intern at Mysterious Ways, and despite taking numerous psych classes, I’d never given my dreams much thought. Until a brown envelope landed on my desk one afternoon. The envelope appeared last summer. One of my job responsibilities is looking through manuscripts sent in from readers across the country. This particular envelope caught my eye because it was lumpy and not the typical manila color. A compact disc and folded letter fell out. Something was written on the face of the CD in black marker: Charles Edward Carver Date: 7/08/2017 People still use CDs? I thought to myself. I unfolded the accompanying letter. The CD had been recorded at a cancer center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where…

Father’s Day morning and I was up at the crack of dawn, on the hunt for antiques at a crowded flea market in Long Beach, California. I’m not a morning person. But my 70-year-old dad specifically requested we go there. Back in Delaware, he ran an antiques business with Mom. He’d heard about the Long Beach flea market from one of his antiquing buddies. “We have to get there early,” he told me. “Before all the good stuff is gone.” I had moved to Los Angeles seven years before to pursue acting and writing. I’m an only child. My parents visited often. I knew they wished I lived closer. Still, they were always so supportive of my challenging career choice. I wanted to do something special for Dad that Father’s…

The window is tall and slender. Its sky-blue panes and red rondels—circular pieces of glass—are radiant in the sun. Its depiction of Jesus, his body bent on the cross, arms outstretched, is soul stirring. You might think it is like any other stained glass church window, requiring the utmost care. You might think any trouble—neglect, flooding, even thieves—would spell the window’s doom. You would be wrong. This is the story of the stained glass window that survived again and again. Growing up, Tony Boccaccio thought only one thing about the window. That it would always be there. In 1958, he was an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Chittenango, New York. Every morning, Tony and his brother walked a mile and a half from their house to help…

I was about to lose my marbles! My basement had flooded after a storm. Water seeped into the foundation, compromising the house. My kids and I had to move. “First, we have to go through the boxes in the basement,” my daughter, Willow, said. I was the kind of person who saved everything. Each time I thought about the boxes in the basement—photo albums, old toys, my wedding dress—I felt sick to my stomach. But Willow was right. It was now or never. We trekked downstairs. I poked through one soggy cardboard box after another. Nothing salvageable. Time to say goodbye. Then a glint of red by the staircase caught my eye. I bent down. A marble from a set I’d had as a little girl! “Kids, look what I…

“The soul, I believe, is the fingerprint of God that becomes the physical body…. Unique in its own development and expression but filled with the divinity that is the essence of all that is.”Iyanla Vanzant, AUTHOR OF TRUST “Would that we could see our souls! We would not have to draw such impoverished images for our imaginations. But souls can only be perceived. We know them through recollection and reflection.”Rev. Terrance W. Klein, AUTHOR OF VANITY FAITH “I have heard some near-death experiencers talk about actually seeing the soul ‘on the other side’ and it is pure light. Our visual spectrum on this plane cannot view it.”Dr. Kathy J. Forti CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST AND AUTHOR OF FRACTALS OF GOD “Only physical objects can be sensed with sight. Nonphysical entities, such as…

It all started with a snowball. One Saturday in Brooklyn, January 1967. I was 19 years old. New York City had just been hit by back-to-back snowstorms within a span of 48 hours. The whole city was at a standstill. The streets and avenues were covered in a thick blanket of white. By early evening, though, there were enough shoveled pathways in my mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood for people to get to five o’clock Mass. I stood on the stoop of my family’s apartment building, just taking it all in. I’d spent the last two days cooped up inside. So when I noticed two pretty girls about my age walking to Mass, I figured I’d have some fun. I threw a snowball in their direction and waved. They laughed and…

Desiree Cole December 16, 2017. I sat on the plane with my husband, Zach, waiting for our flight from New York to take off. Zach was on his phone…and I was silently freaking out. After eight years away—four in Chicago, four in New York City—we were moving back home to Kansas. I was thrilled to be closer to family, but I couldn’t stop thinking of all I was leaving behind. My friends, my job, amazing pizza. What if this was a huge mistake? Please, God, I prayed, give me a sign we’re doing the right thing! Zach nudged me. “Check this out,” he said, holding up his phone. On the screen was a Facebook reminder of what he’d been doing on this day last year. There was a photo of…

Fort Pierce, Florida “What if I told you T2 is alive?” Words that Perry Martin thought he’d never hear. T2 wasn’t a time-traveling robot. He was Perry’s orange tabby cat. Perry, then a K9 cop, had taken in the stray in 2002. Two years later, Hurricane Jeanne hit. In the aftermath, T2 went missing. “I looked for him. The neighbors looked for him,” Perry told USA Today. “No one could find him.” Perry assumed the worst. Then, this past March, he got a call from the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast. A family had spotted a tabby on their lawn. The cat, it turned out, had a microchip. “I figured it was a mistake,” Perry said. “It was too crazy to believe.” But, sure enough, T2 was back. The…

I graduated seminary in 2006, convinced I’d be ministering to people in a traditional brickand-mortar church. One with an active youth ministry, two Sunday services and a few hundred believers. In Tennessee, where I’m from, the church is a rich part of the community’s social fabric. Then I met my wife, Sarah. Not long after we got engaged, she let me in on a little secret—she didn’t want to settle in one place. She wanted to travel, see the world. Her dream was to work in Antarctica. Sarah was in medical school then, training to be an ER doc. That’s a job in demand pretty much anywhere. But I thought hers was one of those out-of-this-world dreams that people only talk about. I mean, who really goes to the South…

I don’t believe in God. I don’t think the universe sends us signs. I’m not one to talk about destiny. Or perfect timing. Or how everything happens for a reason. I’m a newspaper editor. I believe in facts. But there is one thing I just can’t explain. Something I think about every time my wife tells someone about the first time we met. “It’s kind of a funny story,” she’ll say. Not just funny. A monumental coincidence that, 20 years later, still makes me wonder. It happened in May 1996. I was 21. I’d dropped out of college and was working at an open-till-midnight video store in suburban New York until I figured out what to do with my life. I was in a total funk. I’d been hung up…

I look like my paternal grandfather. An old portrait on the wall of my apartment proves it. The same smile. The same blue eyes. The same dark hair. (Okay, mine used to be dark.) Why would I look more like him than my own father? That’s one of those enduring mysteries that only came to be solved 150 years ago, thanks to the work of Gregor Mendel, the Moravian scientist and humble monk. I’m no scientist, but I’ve always had a soft spot for learned monks, and Mendel certainly fits the bill. He was scholarly, soft-spoken, faithful and well-fed, or “blessed with an excess of avoirdupois,” as he put it. That made it hard for him to race up and down the stairs of St. Thomas’s Abbey in Brno, in…

Private Lance Hardy left his family farm in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, to fight in World War I. He died on July 26, 1917, in Belgium, along with three other men from his hometown. Decades later, Lance’s second cousin Michael approached artist Helen Pollock to commission a sculpture for his farm in Hawke’s Bay. The two discovered a shared interest in the Great War, and Michael told Helen about his cousin. She had an idea—a 13-foot steel ladder with four pairs of terra-cotta feet to symbolize the lost soldiers. Jacob’s Ladder was installed in 2017, 100 years after Lance’s death. A homecoming that represents, Helen said, the “heroic journey of ascent and descent.” ↗ Journey to more places unknown at Guideposts.org/SecretSpaces…

“Rarely do we reflect upon what gifts our souls may possess, Who dwells within them or how extremely precious they are.”—TERESA OF ÁVILA Spanish mystic and Carmelite nun Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) was known for her writings on “mental prayer,” the practice of engaging in internal dialogue with God. Teresa felt called at a young age and, as a teen, secretly joined a convent against the wishes of her family (who were of the nobility). Her poor health often led to fevers, during which she would experience ecstatic trances, famously depicted by the Italian sculptor Bernini. In one celebrated vision, she saw the soul as a great crystal castle with seven mansions and God in the innermost room. The concept formed the basis of her most popular book on contemplative…