Innholdsfortegnelse for October - November 2018 i Mysterious Ways

April 2, 1968. Zeitoun, Egypt, a suburb outside Cairo. The country was in the midst of the Arab-Israeli conflict, on the heels of the Six-Day War. Tensions ran high in the predominantly Muslim country, home to a minority of Christians. At the center of it all, on Tumanbay Street, sat St. Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church—Cairo’s largest cathedral. According to local tradition, it was built in 1923 because of a vision. One night, landowner Tawfik Khalil Ibrahim had a dream. In it, the Virgin Mary told him to build her a church in Zeitoun. The very place the Holy Family was said to have passed on their flight to Egypt. If Tawfik did as she asked, Mary promised to appear at the church in 40 years’ time. Forty years passed. Nothing…

“I’ve got a really good story for you,” my editor told me the other day in the office kitchen. I was a newspaper journalist for 25 years before coming to Guideposts. There’s not a whole lot that surprises me. But this, she assured me, wasn’t the usual fare. “This guy’s done a video,” she said. “Watch it. You’ll see what I mean.” It had been shared to the Mysterious Ways Facebook page by Karen Byerley Knutsen. A cell phone video of her father, Kenneth Byerley. I pulled it up online. Ken was an older, affable-looking man in a faded yellow T-shirt that read Clowning to Children. He sat in a brown armchair with a sheaf of papers in front of him. This guy…a video star? Curious, I hit play. “I’m…

The police called at 10 p.m. “Sir,” the officer said. “Your store was hit bad in the storm.” My heart dropped. The afternoon summer storm had been a doozy, a thunderstorm with hurricane-force winds. I rushed to Avant-Garde, my furniture consignment store. Fallen trees and broken glass lay everywhere. The store window had been blown in. The furniture inside was soaked. Could things get worse? My business partner and I had recently opened the store. We’d put everything into renovation, without a dime left for advertising. We had no customers. And now all our hard work had been blown to pieces. The next day, I started cleaning up. News trucks set up right outside. Great. Everyone would see we were ruined! Everyone did see. Our neighbors showed up to help…

Actress and writer Mindy Kaling knows a thing or two about comedic timing. The funny lady starred in TV favorite The Office and the recent hit movie Ocean’s 8. But she also knows something about divine timing. In 2012, Mindy was shopping her TV series The Mindy Project around. The show’s main character and Mindy’s alter ego—Dr. Mindy Lahiri—was based on her own mother, Swati, an OB/GYN. At the time, Swati was battling Stage IV pancreatic cancer. The series was passed over by NBC, where Mindy had been a writer for years. It was, as Mindy put it, a long shot that it would ever see the light of day. The day Swati died, though, Mindy found out—her show had been picked up by Fox. “It was as though when…

May 5, 2018. Dr. Erich Voigt, an ear, nose and throat surgeon at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, was at home watching TV with his wife. HGTV’s Beachfront Bargain Hunt came on. The episode featured Nicole McGuiness, a 31-year-old brain cancer survivor from North Carolina who was on the lookout for a beach bungalow. Dr. Voigt noticed something on Nicole—a lump on her neck. “I wondered, Does she even know?” Dr. Voigt says. “If not, she needed to.” He turned to Facebook, posting a video of Nicole with the following message: “I am watching a TV show and noticed this woman hasa left thyroid mass. She needs a sonogram and fineneedle biopsy. I wonder if she knows and hope it’s benign.#beachfrontbargainhunt.” Two weeks later, one of Nicole’s friends…

Ye and Zue met in 2011 in Chengdu, a city in southwestern China. The couple—referred to by only their first names in news reports—got married and had twin girls. Seven years later, Ye was flipping through his mother-in-law’s photo albums, trying to see whether his daughters resembled his wife or him more. He came across a photo of Zue from 2000, taken in front of the famous May Wind sculpture in Qingdao, on the nation’s eastern coast. Ye had vacationed there himself in 2000—somewhat accidentally. His mother had booked a tour there, then come down with appendicitis. She’d insisted Ye take her place. Ye studied his wife’s photo and noticed another tourist in the background, posing in a distinctive manner. A familiar one. Ye got goose bumps. It was him!…

Another Sunday evening. I sat in front of the TV, watching foot-ball and eating what I called a tuna special—tuna with whatever happened to be in the fridge. I wasn’t much of a cook. I’d eaten a lot of tuna specials since my wife and I separated a year earlier. Our marriage just couldn’t withstand the grief we’d endured since losing two of our kids. Our son James was born prematurely and lived only 10 days. His older brother, Robert, died six years later at 18 of kidney disease. Not a day passed that I didn’t think of them. I worked as a landscaper. I had a lot of time to myself as I tended gardens and mowed lawns. My hobby was metal detecting. I’d found all sorts of old…

1. Out of Body A NDE typically starts with a sense of peace. Survivors describe floating serenely above their bodies and compare the feeling to removing their clothing. In a 2014 study led by Dr. Sam Parnia, author of What Happens When We Die, 40 percent of cardiac arrest survivors reported “awareness”—like watching doctors work on their body—while clinically dead. 2. Through the Tunnel A 2001 study from the Netherlands’ Hospital Rijnstate found 31 percent of cardiac arrest survivors who had a NDE recalled moving through a tunnel. Anecdotal research shows this can take the form of a cave, kaleidoscope or valley but is usually cylindrical and delivers the person into an ethereal light. According to Dr. Parnia, this light often leaves people feeling “less materialistic, kinder to others…less afraid…

“I don’t see why we can’t stay,” my daughter Tara said. Again. She was trying to keep her voice down. But even the smallest noise carried in the stark, still waiting room of the hospital, where, in a room down the hall, my mother lay dying. “We’re adults, Mom,” my daughter Jonelle said. “We want to stay.” I sighed. My daughters weren’t going to make this easy. “Girls, you know that wasn’t the plan,” I said. “It’s not about what we want. It’s about what Grandma wants.” At 94, my mother had been sure of two things: 1) Her days on this earth were numbered, and 2) when she did go, she didn’t want to be surrounded by grieving loved ones. There was no arguing with Mom. She was as…

On a road trip across the Midwest, my mom and I stumbled upon a sight to behold in West Bend, Iowa. A topaz, quartz and azurite marvel called the Shrine of the Grotto of Redemption. It’s the dazzling creation of Father Paul Matthias Dobberstein, who emigrated from Germany in the 1890s to attend seminary. Stricken with pneumonia, he vowed to build a shrine to the Virgin Mary if he recovered. Later sent to West Bend, he kept that promise. From 1912 to 1954, he worked nonstop, transporting precious stones across the country by the truckload. The shrine’s nine grottos stretch an entire city block. A sparkling testament of one man’s gratitude.…