Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2019 i Mysterious Ways

A few years ago, my sister Kristin and I were on the train, throwing around ideas for a “sisters trip.” We were in desperate need of a vacation, Kristin especially. She was going through a tough breakup. I’d been praying for her a lot. “How about Ireland?” Kristin said. I was a little shocked—Kristin doesn’t vacation anywhere that’s below 80 degrees. We laughed at the craziness of her suggestion. But then the strangest thing happened. I began seeing Ireland every where. A poster of Ireland on a beach boardwalk. A calendar at a doctor’s office. I was even assigned a story about a woman whose plane crashes off the Irish coast. One day, Kristin texted me a photo of a newspaper headline she saw on her commute: “Fall for the…

“There is no indication that God made just one person for you. The whole concept that there is one person who is absolutely perfect sets up impossible expectations. It’s up to us to pray, to expect God to be involved in the process, but also to use our own judgment and wisdom and to look for a person that we can commit to for life.”Dr. Joe Beam, AUTHOR OF THE ART OF FALLING IN LOVE “Soul mates certainly do exist! Though it’s not helpful to think about them as necessarily romantic relationships, or as happening only once in a lifetime. Soul mates are that handful of people with whom we connect profoundly, deeply, magically, even mystically—over the course of a lifetime.”Stephen Cope AUTHOR OF SOUL FRIENDS “I don’t think everyone…

When you think about the outcome of the Revolutionary War, it doesn’t seem like the newly formed United States should have prevailed. After all, how did a ragtag, ill-equipped group of colonials stand up to the vast might of the British Empire? Great Britain had more money, more experience, more arms, more everything. The Brits had even hired some 30,000 Hessians—German mercenaries—to fight by their side. But there might be one reason they fell. A coat. A Hessian jacket of red and green. And a most unexpected meeting in the woods… The year was 1780. Four years after the Declaration of Independence, the colonists weren’t even close to victory. In fact, a duplicitous turncoat was plotting with the British: Benedict Arnold, his very name now synonymous with traitor. Feigning loyalty…

“There are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!”—GEORGE MACDONALD Mystic George MacDonald (1824–1905) was a Christian fantasy writer best known for his fairy tales for children and adults. Born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, MacDonald grew up steeped in Celtic folklore. He became a minister but, after a disagreement over doctrine, devoted himself solely to writing. For MacDonald, religion and fantasy weren’t mutually exclusive. His stories, rich with enchantment and symbolism, are really about the great journey of faith. Such as Phantastes, which tells the tale of the hero Anodos, who travels through a land of tree spirits, giants and doorways before making the ultimate sacrifice. MacDonald’s work went on to influence the greatest fantasy writers of our time, from J.R.R. Tolkien to…

Christopher Owan It was a beautiful Sunday in Glenrothes, Scotland, where I’d traveled for business. But I was feeling blue. If I were home with my family in Arizona, I would’ve been at church singing hymns. Instead, I was all alone. Desperate for distraction, I got in my rental car and went for a drive, no destination in mind. A few hours later, I ended up in the Scottish Highlands. I rolled down my car window to enjoy the crisp breeze. That’s when I heard something. Music. I pulled over and stepped out of the car to investigate. In the valley below stood a bagpipe player in full kilt. He was playing a song. I recognized it at once: “Amazing Grace”! Another hymn came after that. Then another. I watched…

Flowers that stretched as far as the eye could see. Light, ethereal and embracing. Peacefulness unlike anything imaginable. Decades later, the survivors remember every detail. Memories so vivid, their day-to-day lives seem muted. Less real than what they saw when, as children, they were transported somewhere beyond our world. A place where time and space don’t exist. For Ingrid Honkala, it happened when she was nearly three and drowned in a water tank. For Alma Blazquez, it was at age four, suffocated at the hands of an abusive family member. And for Teresa McLean, it was at age three, after accidentally overdosing on aspirin. They all died and came back. But not before seeing heaven. The International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) estimates that nearly 85 percent of children…

I was making my morning coffee in the kitchen and wondering how I would get through the day, especially with the rain coming down, when Tony’s picture toppled from the mantle in the family room. Again. Ever since my husband died two years earlier, that gold-framed photo—Tony posing with his prize hunting dogs—kept falling. That wasn’t all that was happening. Sometimes the TV would turn on out of the blue. And I’d get this feeling that Tony was still with me. Was it just the wishful thinking of a lonely widow? I couldn’t be sure. I picked up the frame, dusted it off and put it back in place. I stared out the window that flanked the fireplace, thinking of Tony. If only he really were still here. I needed…

Kerrobert, Saskatchewan, Canada Following their June 2016 wedding, James and Heather Simonson traveled to the Canadian Maritimes. Toward the end of the trip, on Prince Edward Island, the couple stopped to replace their camera’s memory card with a new one. In the process, they lost the old one. “We do believe in the power of prayer, so we were praying that we’d be able to find it or somehow it would get returned to us,” Heather told CBC. Weeks later, Lucie Mallet and her boyfriend were walking through the parking lot of a P.E.I. tourist spot and found a memory card on the ground. Lucie popped it into her computer at home and found photos of a happy couple. She posted one of them on Facebook, hoping to find its…

The phone rang just as I was getting my five-year-old son ready for school. It was Mom. I could tell she’d been crying. “Kathy,” she said. “It’s your dad.” It was the call I’d been expecting. The call I’d been dreading. Dad was homeless. A veteran and an alcoholic who could never seem to land on his feet. My parents divorced when I was little. Dad lived in Anchorage, Alaska, same as me. Though I longed for a relationship with him, we rarely saw each other. How could we? He’d been in and out of shelters since I was a kid. “I’m so sorry, Kathy,” Mom said. “He’s gone.” He’d been found unconscious on the street after a heart attack. Up till then, a small part of me had been…

On a remote island off British Columbia stand 26 totem poles. The village of SGang Gwaay was once inhabited by the Haida, whose population was decimated by smallpox in the 1880s. Aside from special Haida watchmen, the hand-carved cedar totem poles are the village’s only residents. Some of the totems, up to 70 feet tall and carved with family emblems, contain ashes of Haida leaders. Just 12 visitors are allowed at a time. In keeping with the Haida belief that spirit and land are connected, the totems have been allowed to disintegrate. Only decades remain before they return to nature. Tour mystical places around the world at Guideposts.org/SecretSpaces…