Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2020/January 2021 i Mysterious Ways

The Christmas season is a mystical one. For me, listening to Christmas carols always adds to the magic, and “Good King Wenceslas” stands out. Its beautiful story of a Christmas miracle dates back centuries. It may not be the most popular carol. But its timeless message has made it a constant on my holiday playlist for years. It opens with an unforgettable scene: a blustery evening on the Feast of Saint Stephen, the day after Christmas. A page is struggling against the cold and dark to keep up with the king he serves. The good king himself is out on this unforgiving winter night, determined to give alms to a peasant in need. Despite the weather, the page finds that when he follows along, walking carefully in the king’s footsteps,…

I stepped out of the federal prison in South Dakota after a decade behind bars and breathed a sigh of relief. I’d served my time. But I wasn’t just free. I was a new man. Honestly, I doubted anyone who knew me before would recognize me. I hardly recognized me. My home life hadn’t been great growing up. My dad died in a car accident when I was just 10. He’d been abusive and violent. An alcoholic. When I was 16, my mother remarried. Another alcoholic. My stepfather handed me my first beer at 18. “Drink up,” he said. “You’re a man now.” I did. I drank and drank. Soon I was drinking like my old man. In college, I got into drugs. Smoking pot at first, then popping pills…

“I saw a butterfly,” my mother said with a shy smile. It was the first time I’d seen her smile since my father’s death the week before. After a seven-year period of steadily declining health, he’d passed away in his bed at home, surrounded by his wife and three daughters. It was a peaceful end to his suffering, but saying goodbye was still difficult. We all missed him terribly. Especially Mami. “I asked your papi for a sign,” she said. She told me she’d left her Manhattan apartment to run some errands for the luncheon we were planning in Papi’s honor. “I was waiting at a crosswalk, and I just prayed from the heart. I said, ‘Send me a butterfly to let me know you’re all right.’ Not an hour…

It was December 2012, a week before Christmas. I was sitting alone at my kitchen table in Missouri, watching the hands of my Christmas clock tick toward the hour. I was waiting to hear it play “Silent Night,” which it did every night at 11 o’clock. The tune always lifted my spirits. But the second hand passed the hour mark without a peep. My heart sank. The music mechanism must have broken. You couldn’t have picked a better metaphor for my life—I kept on ticking, but the joy was missing. The past few years had been difficult. I’d served in the Army for 26 years, including as a military foreign area officer in Western Europe. I’d lived there with my husband and our daughters. My husband was enlisted but had…

We were only 48 hours into our family’s three-week road trip when the car broke down. White smoke billowed from the engine. The dashboard warning lights went on. “Where did all this come from?” my husband, Gareth, said. He pulled off at the next exit. I glanced at our sons in the back seat. Colin, seven, and Aidan, five, looked disappointed. We were in Michigan, in the middle of nowhere, on our way to Mackinaw Island. From there we planned to visit the Badlands of South Dakota and Mount Rushmore, then Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier National Parks. It would be a grand tour! But so far the kids hadn’t seen anything but the road, and our Honda Odyssey didn’t seem up for the adventure. Maybe I wasn’t either. Life…

It’s hard to imagine that Meryl Streep at one point believed acting was not her calling. Widely considered the best actress of her generation, she has received 21 Academy Award nominations—more than any other actor—and won three times. But her life almost took a very different path. Born in 1949 in Summit, New Jersey, Mary Louise Streep loved acting as she grew up but never considered it a worthwhile career. “Many of my friends woke up at three years of age and said, ‘I have to be onstage.’ I never had that,” she said at Indiana University in 2014. “I thought it was vain to be an actress. Plus, I thought I was too ugly….” After graduating from Vassar College in 1971, she enrolled at Yale School of Drama but…

I heard the front door to our apartment open and walked over to see my mom returning home from the laundromat. She had tears in her eyes. “Mom,” I said, “what’s wrong?” “I’m so sorry, Sara, but I lost your butterfly necklace while doing the laundry. I found it in your jeans pocket before putting everything in the washer. I put it in my purse for safekeeping, but it must have fallen out as I was moving things around.” She burst into tears. I rushed over to give her a hug. “I have other necklaces, Mom,” I said. “Don’t worry.” Inside, though, I was really disappointed. I just didn’t want to make her feel worse. The necklace was special to both of us. Mom had given it to me as…

Lori M. Miller I’d been struggling with depression, and my therapist recommended that I start a weekly activity to help me meet people. I’d always been a homebody. I usually came home from work and stayed in for the rest of the night. Then an idea came to me out of nowhere: Join a bowling league. As if the sentence had been placed in my head. I’d never bowled in my life. I’d never even set foot in a bowling alley. Yet this decision just felt right. I signed up for a league and began going once a week. I loved it and made some friends, but I still wasn’t sure what had drawn me to bowling. Until my third week, when I played against Dave. He was funny and…

Lihue, Hawaii The dress, a purple-and-pink floral muumuu, caught Shannon Hiramoto’s eye while she was browsing the Salvation Army thrift store. Her great-grandmother, who’d passed away five years ago, would’ve loved it. She’d always worn colorful muumuus just like this one. Then Shannon noticed a name handwritten on the dress’s label: Kamei. Her great-grandmother’s last name. Could it really have been one of hers? “It looked so familiar,” Shannon wrote in an Instagram post, “but I needed proof.” Shannon called her mom, who started looking through old family photos. Sure enough, they found a picture of Shannon’s great-grandmother Florence Shizuko Kamei wearing the pink-and-purple muumuu! Shannon recognized where the photo had been taken. It was at Florence’s church in Hanapepe. Her final resting place. “I’ve come full circle,” said Shannon.…

Seat 23D. I walked down the airplane aisle, reading the signs above the rows. I was flying from my home in Charlotte to Los Angeles to spend Thanksgiving with my son. I found my seat, stowed my bag in the overhead bin and settled in for the five-hour nonstop flight. A couple was seated next to me, and we exchanged polite smiles. After lunch was served, I started to not feel well. My stomach churned, and I felt dizzy. I put my head between my knees, trying to stay calm. This is the worst place to get sick! I thought. I felt a gentle hand on my back. It was the man next to me. “Are you okay?” he asked. I told him I wasn’t feeling well. He and his…

“Death limits life. The clock is ticking. It encourages us to number our days and seek meaning. Death is an intruder that entered when humans turned away from God. But God turned to us through Jesus Christ, whose death and resurrection offer eternal life to his followers. Thus, death loses its sting for those who trust the Savior.”Douglas Groothuis, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, DENVER SEMINARY “It is death that provides life with all its meaning.”M. Scott Peck, M.D., PSYCHIATRIST AND AUTHOR “We’re all born into a fragmented world and spend our lives longing for love. We can glimpse joy, but the nature of life prevents us from ever fully experiencing it. Death is a doorway to something greater and the promise that we will finally achieve wholeness and oneness with all…

Below the surface of Lake Michigan lies an 11-foot marble crucifix. The cross was crafted in Italy in the 1950s for a Michigan family but arrived damaged. A Lake Michigan diving club then bought it, submerging it to honor the many people who’ve perished by water. The crucifix now rests at a depth of some 20 feet in Little Traverse Bay, near Petoskey, Michigan. During the winter, if the ice is thick enough, supervised groups trek out onto the lake to view the artwork. Its unique location and quiet beauty have drawn many thousands of visitors over the years. Check out other mysterious spiritual spots at MYSTERIOUS Guideposts.org/SecretSpaces…

“Prayer is something noble, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites it to God.”—SAINT THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX (1873–1897) Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, “the little flower of Jesus,” was a nun, writer and mystic. She felt the presence of God in mysterious happenings throughout her life, most notably during her sudden healing from a life-threatening childhood illness. She entered a Carmelite convent as a 15-year-old and practiced her “little way,” recognizing her smallness before God and humbly embodying his love through the quiet acts of charity that we are all capable of. Her writings, including her epistolary autobiography, Story of a Soul, sought to inspire a similar spiritual awareness in others. At the age of 24, she died of tuberculosis. She was canonized and later designated a doctor of the Catholic…