Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec/Jan 2024 i Mysterious Ways

For this final issue of Mysterious Ways magazine, I asked the staff to reprint our feature on the Watts Towers in Los Angeles (page 11). I learned about the fascinating structures in college while reading The Ascent of Man by science writer Jacob Bronowski. He wrote elegantly about the pyramids of Egypt, the great cathedrals of Europe and finally the mysterious Watts Towers, 17 of them, the tallest nearly a hundred feet, built by a simple workman named Simon Rodia. Two classmates and I hitchhiked across the country to see the towers. I marveled at their strange complexity, made of ordinary things Rodia had picked up off the ground—glass, broken pottery, scrap rebar, wire, tile, almost any discarded thing. It took years to recognize the genius of the towers. In…

The Watts Towers of Los Angeles are 17 soaring structures meticulously erected by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia from 1921 to 1954, using nothing more than scrap metal, mortar, glass, ceramics and hand tools. In 1959, the city tried to topple them, arguing they were unstable. Steel cables were attached to each tower and pulled by a crane. They didn’t budge, and the crane experienced mechanical failure. Today admirers marvel how one man, a simple laborer, could assemble such creations that have survived storms, earthquakes and the ravages of time.…

“We were created out of love, from Love to love. Love connects us to God, the source of love, the wellspring of love.… God fills our hearts with his love; as we accept his love, it fills us up to overflowing. The overflow is our meaning and purpose in life, sharing God’s love with others so they may know his love. As we love others, we are serving and honoring God, giving him praise and glory. I believe that is why we are here, to love as God so loved us.”Dr. Rhonda Dawes Milner, AUTHOR OF THE SIGNATURE OF GOD “Our true nature is divine and eternal. Our true purpose of life is to awaken and realize that permanent divinity that is within us.”Amit Ray, AUTHOR OF ENLIGHTENMENT STEP BY…

Every day I live in pain. Mostly it’s my left arm. The limb I almost lost in a freak accident a few years ago. Now my brain erroneously senses sharp pain there at every moment. I’m numb in several fingers. I can’t grip things with my thumb. I used to be the big, strong, go-to fix-it guy at the church where I’m an executive pastor. The guy who could lift his kids and swing them around without breaking a sweat. I’m not that guy anymore. And yet I give thanks for the accident that forever changed my life. I’ve come to believe that pain can be a blessing. That loss itself can be an opportunity. Not convinced? Well, let me tell you my story.… It happened on my daughter Cara’s…

KRISTEN: I’d just drifted off to sleep when a face appeared before me. Handsome, with tan skin, dark hair, bushy eyebrows, light blue eyes and a kind smile… I woke with a start. Why am I dreaming about Kyle? I thought. I don’t even know him. I had seen Kyle only once, briefly, a few weeks before. I was visiting my friend’s business. Kyle was also there visiting his girlfriend. I thought nothing of it. He was in a relationship. Dating was the furthest thing from my mind. So why was I dreaming about an unavailable guy I’d seen in passing? I tried to put Kyle out of my thoughts, but the dream stayed with me. I remembered it clearly all the next day, and every so often over the…

Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is home to a stair-case with a mysterious origin. The chapel, now a museum, was constructed in 1878 for a Catholic girls school. When the structure was completed, there was no way to reach the choir loft. The nuns who were in charge of the school and the chapel consulted several carpenters, but each of them said that building stairs in such a small space would be extremely difficult. Legend has it that the sisters prayed for nine days for a solution. On the ninth day, a man arrived at the chapel. He said he was a carpenter who had heard of their plight. Working alone, he created the staircase, then disappeared without collecting his pay or revealing his name. The spiral staircase…

“We are visited in ways that we can understand and in ways that are beyond our understanding….”—HOWARD THURMAN (1899–1981) In 1910, Howard Thurman’s mother took him to observe Halley’s Comet. The future theologian, civil rights leader, mystic, author and educator, then 11 years old, asked what would happen if the comet fell to earth. “Nothing will happen to us, Howard,” his mother said. “God will take care of us.” He instantly felt a unity “with what created and controlled the comet.” That connection between God and the natural world shaped Thurman’s theology and writings. He rooted his civil rights activism in faith and radical nonviolence, ideas that influenced Martin Luther King Jr. Thurman helped create the nation’s first interfaith, interracial church in San Francisco, telling congregants to “celebrate the spirit…

I stood in front of the medicine cabinet, staring at a bottle of pills that I had taken down from one of the top shelves. My gaze ranged over the translucent orange plastic, the controlled substance warning on the label, the childproof white cap that sometimes was a struggle for me to open…. Then I thought of my two little girls and put the bottle back on the shelf. I went to the kitchen and waited for my husband to come down before he left for work. “Kev, can you call Dr. Richards?” I asked. My voice was flat, almost a monotone. “I think I need to go to the hospital.” “Okay,” Kevin said. There was no surprise in his voice. We’d been living with my bipolar disorder for three years.…

I almost didn’t see her. I was heading into Pittsburgh, across the bridge over the Allegheny River, late for work, and she was little more than a shadow by the seven-foot fence that lined the edge. But I got a feeling that I’d missed something. I tapped the brake, adjusted my rearview mirror. Then I saw what I had missed—a young woman climbing over. I knew the stories about desperate souls who came to the bridge to take a fatal leap. Sometimes the police talked them out of it. Some-times. I felt my throat clutch. I was the last person who should be on a bridge with a suicide jumper. I was beginning to think I couldn’t do anything right. Just speaking up in class was hard enough. I was struggling…

Almost 70 years later, Marilyn Mitchell still struggles to find the words for what happened that night. “I don’t know that I’ve ever recovered from it,” she says. “It was just very traumatic.” “Something like that you don’t for-get,” says Frances Maguire, who was only nine years old at the time. March 1, 1950, was drawing to a cold, blustery close in Beatrice, Ne-braska. Marilyn Mitchell (then Marilyn Paul) had finished dinner with her family at home. She was exhausted after a long day working at the dry cleaner, where the 18-year-old hoped to earn enough money to go to college. An accomplished pianist, she dreamed of studying at The Juilliard School in New York. For now, West Side Baptist Church was her concert hall. “I’m going to take a quick…

The dream was unlike any I’d ever had before or since. It felt so real. With total clarity, I saw a man and a woman stranded at sea in a lifeboat, no land in sight. It was night. They were terrified. Although I wasn’t with them in the boat, I felt somehow involved in their plight, almost as if they were pleading for my help. Still inside my dream, I prayed repeatedly, Lord, that couple needs you. Please come to their rescue. Please save them somehow. I awoke in tears. It was dark out. Looking at my clock, I saw that it was hours before my alarm would go off and I would have to get up for work. It was just a nightmare, I told myself. But the sense…