Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2023 i Mysterious Ways

I like to go for walks. Just a few blocks from my apartment is a path along the river with a gorgeous view of the New York City skyline. On the weekends—if I don’t have any other plans—I lace up my sneakers, pick a direction and walk for hours. Sometimes I listen to music or audiobooks. Other times it’s just me and my thoughts and all the time in the world. One particular Saturday, a chilly afternoon in early June, I planned to set out on one of my walking adventures. I usually don’t bring much with me. But that day, I decided to take a PowerBar, just in case I needed a pick-me-up later. I was out of my favorite kind, the peanut butter ones, but that didn’t stop…

I hung up the phone and marked my calendar with another appointment for next week. That made three. God, how am I going to do this? I never imagined I would have a special needs child, much less two. I loved Noah and Seth, but their schedules could be overwhelming. One doctor after another. Private duty nursing. Medical supplies. Pharmacies. Physical therapy. Hospitals. Surgeries. We were either in the car traveling to specialists more than an hour away or trying to recover from the trips. Feet dragging, I made my way to the living room to find my husband, Sam. “I made us dinner,” he said, “but we’ll have to reheat yours.” “Honey, I am so sorry. I had that phone call from the home-health agency, then I had to…

Two more dives. That’s all my husband, Larry, and I had left in St. Lucia. We’d spent a week here in paradise. Now it was almost time to go back to Kentucky. Almost, but not quite. “What a gorgeous day!” I said as we boarded the dive boat. On the agenda was viewing a wrecked ship plus whatever tropical life we’d encounter: fish, coral, maybe even some sea turtles. “Look who’s here.” Larry pointed to another couple waving to us, the Brits we’d sat with at dinner the night before. They were novice divers who wanted to hear about the hundreds of dives my husband and I had done between us. “Everyone buddy up,” the dive master announced. “Two by two.” Our new friends turned to Larry and me. “What…

My friend Steve and I were driving from California to Salt Lake City, Utah, to attend a church conference. We drove six hours before stopping for the night. The next morning, we headed out again, Steve behind the wheel. Four hours to go. About 30 minutes later, I fell asleep. And I had a dream. In it, I was still in the passenger seat of the car. We were driving fast, but I wasn’t concerned. I was admiring a cabin in the distance. As we sped past it, I looked up and noticed that the car was drifting off the road. I watched helplessly as the car slid through the sand and gravel, careening toward a telephone pole. I opened my eyes with a start, relieved I had only been…

As soon as I got home, I collapsed on the couch. The past three days had been a haze of insomnia and anxiety. I was exhausted. The previous Saturday, my mother had called me complaining of stomach pain. Jeanne Marie Gentile Pelusi was a strong-willed woman. Even as she aged, she never wanted to be a burden to her children and prized her independence above all else. If she was asking for help, something was seriously wrong. I lived nearby, so I was there in a flash. I drove her to the hospital. Good thing too. Mom suffered a near-fatal heart attack right there in the waiting room. She spent the next few days in the ICU. As soon as she was stable, Mom demanded to be discharged. She had…

Another night of babysitting. It was my sister, Kori, who was the single mother, but since moving in with her, I some-times felt like I was in this alone. I glanced at the clock. Kori still wasn’t home, and I didn’t plan on going to bed until she was. With baby Olivia asleep nearby, I lay down on the couch. Just to rest my eyes, I thought. For a minute. I wasn’t even aware that I’d fallen asleep when a voice woke me. “Get up! Check the door!” I opened my eyes, confused. Must have been dreaming, I thought, letting my eyes close again. The front door was tricky. You couldn’t tell if it was truly locked just by looking at it, so I always checked the handle. I thought…

A favorable weather forecast was the only incentive I needed to treat myself to a weekend at Ocean Isle Beach. October is my favorite time to go. With the summer crowds gone, it’s peaceful and relaxing. Twilight was fading when I arrived after a three-hour drive from Raleigh. I headed straight down to the water. I actually went farther than I intended. The beach had recently undergone a revitalization project, and I was eager to see the results. As I took a quick step back to avoid an incoming wave, my ankle twisted, throwing me onto the hard-packed sand. I tried to stand, but the excruciating pain forced me back down. Now flat on my back, I propped myself up on my elbows, looking for help on the deserted beach.…

“Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.”Elie Wiesel, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR AND NOBEL PRIZE–WINNING WRITER “When I am able to resist the temptation to judge others, I can see them as teachers of forgiveness in my life, reminding me that I can only have peace of mind when I forgive rather than judge.”Gerald G. Jampolsky AUTHOR OF LOVE IS LETTING GO OF FEAR “Peace begins with a smile.”Mother Teresa “It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”Eleanor Roosevelt “Never be in a hurry: Do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inward peace for anything whatsoever, even if…

The reflective tape on his yellow rain jacket caught the sun’s light as Paul dug through the dumpster. It was the summer of 2020, and Paul was self-employed. But he also had a side hustle: dumpster diving. Often he took trips to dumpsters behind businesses to look for discarded treasures. The best finds he could sell for some much-needed cash. That day—August 25 to be exact—he found something special. A set of abandoned golf clubs. Something about them spoke to Paul. Made of polished chrome and in a sleek, midnight black leather bag, they looked well loved. In good condition too. Who would intentionally throw the clubs in a dumpster? He knew he could sell them for $90, easily. But Paul and his wife felt a nudge when he brought…

Diane Clair In the spring of 2005, I received some upsetting news. My husband, Henry, who had been planning to retire from the National Guard after more than 30 years of service, was being deployed to Iraq. Although I wanted to be strong, especially for our teenage daughter, it was hard. When the morning of his deployment came, I drove Henry to the airport and kissed him goodbye. Back at home, though, I burst into sobs. “God, please send me a sign that my Henry will be okay.” Too wrung out to cook dinner, I ordered pizza. When I went to pick it up, I was stunned. In the sky was a brilliant rainbow. Moments later, a fawn wandered out of the woods and walked directly toward me. My jaw…

Oberdorf, Bopfingen, Germany In 1990, a father and son found something unusual in the attic: a chest containing a Jewish Bible. In April 2017, the son sold it to Gerhard Roese, an art historian, who learned that the Bible belonged to a Jewish couple killed in the Holocaust. Before leaving their home in 1942, Eduard and Ernestine Leiter hid their Bible in the chest. They died in Treblinka, a Nazi concentration camp. Their son, Sali, was the lone survivor in the family but had no knowledge of the Bible. Gerhard donated the Bible to a local synagogue, where it remained for nearly four years, until Jo-Ellyn Decker, a research and reference librarian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, heard about it. A postcard inside the Bible confirmed that Eduard Leiter…

Dr. Lukens’s voice was gentle but his words were crushing. “There’s nothing more we can do for Vinny,” our veterinarian said. “His body isn’t responding to the insulin, but if we continue to increase his units, he will die.” I couldn’t even look at my husband, Kameron. I knew if I did, I’d break down. And I didn’t want Vinny, our nine-year-old Italian greyhound, to panic. He’d already been through so much, and of all our dogs, he was the most sensitive to people’s feelings, especially mine. Fighting to remain calm, I held Vinny and stroked his side. His ribs jutted out. Even for a slender breed, he was too thin. Dangerously thin. Because of his diabetes. More to the point, because we couldn’t find a way to manage his…

Delia Ephron co-wrote the screenplay for the 1998 hit movie You’ve Got Mail with her late sister, writer-director Nora Ephron. At the time, Delia had no idea that the plot—two people falling in love over email—would one day mirror her own life. In 2012, Nora died of leukemia; three years later, Delia’s husband died of cancer. After writing an essay about her grief in The New York Times, Delia got an email from Peter Rutter, a psychiatrist whom she’d been set up with as a teenager by her late sister. The pair had gone on a couple of dates—54 years earlier. “It was the most charming note,” Delia told the Today show. “So I wrote him back.” Delia admitted that she had soon “completely fallen in love over email…. We…

“He who searches for Divine Reality with all his heart and soul, and finds it, becomes aware that, before he began to seek God, God was seeking him….”—SADHU SUNDAR SINGH Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889–1929) was an Indian missionary and mystic. As a young boy, he attended a Christian primary school where he “felt the Divine attractiveness and wonderful power of the Bible.” But at age 14, upon his mother’s death, Sundar suffered a crisis of faith. Angry, he demanded that God reveal himself. Sundar prayed for hours until, suddenly, his room filled with light. A man appeared before him and spoke: “How long will you deny me? I have died for you; I have given my life for you.” It was Jesus. Sundar fell on his knees. Soon after, he was…