Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  During this period, someone else in the group gave everyone a copy of a marriage book by our friend Emerson Eggerichs, titled Love and Respect. Emerson had actually tested the material in the book at some NCS meetings a few years before. Paul devoured the book and was particularly struck by a chapter about what to do if only one partner in a marriage wants it to heal. It said he should look at his spouse as though Jesus were standing right behind her and love her out of obedience to Jesus, not because he felt like loving her.

  That October Lisa had started seeing a therapist. It was not to help her with her marriage, which she had already consigned to the ash heap of her past, but rather to help her with the new self she was hoping to find to go along with her new life. One day the therapist, who was not a Christian, threw a monkey wrench into Lisa’s future hopes and plans. As he listened to her talking about herself and what she had been feeling, he advised her to take responsibility for her own anger toward her husband. He said that it was not healthy to blame her husband and that she must own up to her own part in feeling that anger. Lisa says that for some reason this caused the beginning of a shift in her view of everything. She began to look at herself and her emotions more critically, and for the first time it enabled her to simply stop blaming Paul and focusing her anger on him.

  Nonetheless, she was still firmly resolved to “move on,” and although their marriage was not yet officially over, Lisa was living her life as though it was: She had not worn her wedding and engagement rings for months and had been sleeping in another room in the house. She had even begun looking for a place to move with the children. Although Paul had instructed his divorce lawyer to move as slowly as possible so that God had time to work, the legal process was moving forward and it would be only a matter of time before things were finalized and the marriage would be over officially and legally. But Paul was still standing on God’s promises and praying the Scripture verses from Hosea and Jeremiah, believing that God would protect Lisa from any adulterous links to other men, and believing that God could and would restore her to the marriage and to God himself.

  Then one Friday morning that November—it was the nineteenth of the month—Paul returned from an NCS meeting to deliver some startling news. He told Lisa that Jim Lane, who was the head of NCS, had just checked into a rehab for alcohol addiction. Jim Lane was the head of NCS, which Lisa at this time thought of as representing Christianity in their lives, even though she wasn’t too excited about NCS or its particular brand of Christianity. So when Lisa heard that Jim had humbled himself in this way, had admitted his problem and had taken measures to deal with it head-on, she was deeply affected. The news hit her extremely hard. She remembered thinking that if this Christian leader had the courage to be that open and honest about his problems, and if he believed that God really could help him, then perhaps God really could help her too. But actually it wasn’t just the idea that God could perhaps help Lisa. It was a much more startling idea that perhaps God could help the two of them, Lisa and Paul, heal their marriage. The news about Jim Lane seemed to suddenly cause her to shift from believing her marriage utterly dead and hopeless to being somehow within reach of God. Although she wasn’t at all sure why—nor at all in touch with the feelings that were now unleashed—Lisa was completely and utterly undone by the news about Jim that morning, and about what she saw as its implications for her and Paul. Somehow she felt herself shift subtly toward God, toward yielding her will and her problems to his care. As a result of this slight but significant change in her heart and mind, the emotions that came out of her now were practically overwhelming.

  But the famously buttoned-up Lisa could not at this time allow herself to be overwhelmed. She simply had too much happening that day especially to open herself up to her sudden emotions. What lay ahead required her undiluted attention. When Paul had returned from the NCS gathering, Lisa was getting dressed and preparing for an especially crucial meeting in Manhattan. In fact, she was about to drive to the Stamford train station when Paul returned. She was taking the train into the city to preside over an important presentation at a fund-raising luncheon for the Bowdoin Alumni Fund. So Lisa pulled herself together now, drove to the station, and got on her train. But as she sat on the train, headed to her important meeting, the feelings that had threatened to overwhelm her when Paul told her about Jim began to make good on their threat. She hardly knew what she was feeling or thinking, but her head was swimming and her emotions were beginning to get the better of her. There was so much riding on her presentation that she simply had to get ahold of herself. She couldn’t. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t get the upper hand on her disorienting emotions, neither as she rode into the city nor afterward. As a result, she failed to deliver the crackerjack presentation she had hoped to deliver. In fact, it was close to a disaster. Type-A personalities like Lisa weren’t used to failing. But there was no getting around it: She was a complete emotional wreck.

  After the terrible experience of the luncheon, Lisa thought she could recover herself by going shopping with a few friends, so she contacted some friends and did go shopping with them. But even this shiny weapon in her Fairfield County arsenal failed to deliver. But Lisa had one more idea. She contacted some friends in Stamford and made plans to have dinner with them. That should do it. She went to Grand Central, got on her train, and met her friends in Stamford at a favorite restaurant. But somehow Lisa’s feelings continued to get worse. She was even beginning to feel physically sick. So right in the middle of dinner, she apologized to her friends and excused herself, saying she didn’t feel at all well and simply had to go home.

  But just now, when she got in her car to drive the fifteen minutes to her home, the dam burst completely. As she drove, Lisa began sobbing uncontrollably and screaming to God. “Save my life!” she screamed. “Save my marriage!” She screamed these phrases over and over in a way that she described as raw and guttural and completely unlike her. It was such an extraordinary unleashing of emotions that Lisa said she stopped the car six times and pulled over. She was actually afraid she wouldn’t be able to make it home. She would pull over and then begin again, all the while crying hysterically, screaming, begging God to help her. She said it was as if she were praying from and with her whole body.

  When she finally got home, Lisa went straight to bed, hoping that in the morning she would be able to get a handle on whatever it was that she was feeling. But she awoke feeling just as out of sorts as ever. But again reaching into her arsenal of type-A weapons, she decided she would go to the gym and take two spin classes, back-to-back. Intense exercise could always be counted on to blow away the cobwebs and make her feel great. But before she walked out the door, Paul saw her and let her know that he would be willing to see her therapist with her as she had asked. He had previously refused to do so.

  Near the end of her second spin class, Lisa was about as physically spent as she had ever been. But the intense exercise had failed to deliver on what she had hoped. She knew that she was the same bona fide mess she had been when she began, and now the final burst of exercise proved too much. As soon as the last song was over she stopped, utterly spent, and leaned over the handlebars with her eyes closed. But just as she did so, Lisa had a sudden, vivid vision of Jesus hanging on the cross. “It was at dusk,” she told me. “And there was light coming from behind him.” Lisa had never had a vision before in her life, but there on the exercise bike, with her eyes closed, she clearly saw Jesus on the cross. She said that she then knew for the first time in her life that what he had suffered wasn’t just a general thing for all of humanity. It was something that Jesus had done just for her, and the realization undid her. All day long afterward, she remained an emotional wreck.

  The following Sunday was her son’s sixth birthday, and Lisa promised that she’d spend the whole day with him, no matter what. For some reason, he declared that he wanted to go to church that morning and see the movie The Polar Express, an animated film featuring the
voice of Tom Hanks, that afternoon. Paul had been regularly taking the children to church without Lisa for months. Lisa was terrified because she felt that the people in their church who knew what was going on in her life would judge her. She had good reason to worry, because it had been the “advice” of people in this same church that had driven her away months before. But to keep her promise, she went anyway, and was surprised that everyone that morning was especially kind and loving to her. Later that day, she and Paul took their son and daughter to see Polar Express. The movie is not in any way Christian, but the message of the movie—believe—felt very personal to her. “I knew it was God,” Lisa told me. “He pierced through that movie, with a one-word message to me: Believe! I didn’t need to know how or when to believe. The message was just that I must believe and he would take care of the rest.”

  The next day, Paul came home from work and saw that Lisa had her wedding ring on for the first time in nearly eight months. When he asked her about it, she told him that it was a sign of her commitment to God “and to our marriage.” Needless to say, Paul was stunned and even confused by these words. Then the following day, after sleeping for the last eight months in another bedroom, Lisa moved all her belongings back into the master bedroom. That night Paul got home very late from work and when he went into the bedroom where he had been sleeping alone for the previous eight months, he saw his wife asleep in their bed.

  12

  ANGELIC MIRACLES

  For He shall give His angels charge over you.

  —PSALM 91:11

  The Bible is filled with stories about angels, but many of us have had our view of angels confused by popular misconceptions about them, the principal of which is that angels do not actually exist any more than fairies do, or wood nymphs or water sprites. But they do exist and the Bible attests to their existence innumerable times.*

  The word “angel” is simply the New Testament Greek word meaning “messenger,” so angels are powerful celestial beings created by God to carry his messages and to otherwise do his bidding. In the Bible they are often said to be carrying swords—something my friend Peter Martin corroborates in the first story of this chapter. So in saying what angels are—according to what we know from the Bible—we must also say what angels are not. For one thing, they are not fey, effeminate creatures, languid as a Victorian heroine. They are also not chubby and unthreatening cherubs. Most angels we see in Scripture are exceedingly fierce and usually terrifying to humans, whether they have swords or not.

  Many of us have heard the term “seraphs,” which refers to the seraphim, the highest order of angelic beings, having six wings and being charged with guarding the throne of God. Many of us have also heard about the cherubim, who are the next order of angels, and who are pictured in Genesis as guarding the Tree of Life. But cherubim have become confused with the plump, toddler-like creatures commonly called cherubs, which we sometimes see depicted as Eros figures in Greek and Roman art, usually fluttering around Aphrodite or Pan. Those creatures, which we also see in the work of Raphael, are nowhere mentioned in the Bible.

  There are various types of encounters with angels. A typical one is when they intervene to save a life.

  My friend April Hernandez, whose story of inner healing appears in a previous chapter, told me just such a story. It happened when she was thirteen years old. She had gone to the beach in the Bronx with some friends. But where they had decided to go into the water, far from other people, there was an immediate and very sharp drop-off. April couldn’t swim, so she wasn’t about to go in. Instead, she stood with her legs in the water, near the edge of this sharp drop-off, intending to go no farther. But as she stood there her friend—who herself wasn’t much of a swimmer—began to tease April. “C’mon!” she said, goading her not to be such a chicken. Then, without warning, she grabbed April and pulled her into the deep water. April immediately went under and panicked. In a desperate desire to save her own life, she frantically grabbed at her friend and began pulling her down too. April knew she was drowning. Then, suddenly, she felt a powerful hand grab her by the arm and pull her the few feet to shore, saving her life. But when she opened her eyes and looked up to see who had saved her from drowning, she saw no one. It had to be an adult, because it had been a very strong grip and had pulled her right out. But there was no one there. On the sand around her there were no footprints. Nor were there many people on the beach at all, and certainly not near her. If it had been a person, surely he would have stayed there a moment to make sure that she was okay. If he had pulled her out so quickly, he had obviously seen she was in trouble. But whoever had done this was not there, even seconds after it had happened. April knew without any doubt that she had experience a miracle, that an angel had saved her life.

  Another type of angelic encounter is when someone simply sees an angel or angels. In these instances the angels are not communicating with us, per se, or doing anything that involves us, but are just there doing what God has commanded them to do. Yet we are afforded the privilege of seeing into the heavenly realm. In the Book of Second Kings in the Bible, we read of how the King of Aram is at war with Israel. Elisha the prophet is traveling with Israel’s army and when his servant awakes one morning, he sees the enemy army surrounding them, with horses and chariots. But when he tells Elisha this, Elisha is not concerned. He prays, “Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.” The passage says that the Lord then opened the servant’s eyes and he “saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.” In other words, he saw what was there, but what had been invisible to him: God’s army of angels with their “chariots of fire.” Sometimes it seems that God allows us to see into the invisible realm simply to encourage us.

  A third type of angelic experience occurs when we encounter an angel in the guise of a person. In the Book of Judges, both Gideon and Manoah converse with angels, but only realize after the angel has left. In the New Testament book of Hebrews, it says, “Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, for some who have done this have entertained angels without realizing it.” So the idea that angels sometimes are disguised as people is certainly a Biblical idea. Many people on the mission field tell stories along this line; the last story in this chapter is one such story, as is the last story in chapter 11.

  ANGELS IN CHURCH

  My friend Peter Martin sometimes comes across like an upper-class caricature, complete with double-breasted navy blazer, bow tie, and lock-jawed pronunciation. He could be Frasier Crane’s long-lost brother or a stock character from a Preston Sturges film. Peter knows more about British church choirs and private clubs than anyone you will ever meet. He’s also the man who taught me how to fold my three-pointed pocket handkerchief.

  Peter is therefore perhaps the last person one might expect to be able to see into the eternal realm and tell us about it. In fact, I hadn’t even planned to ask him whether he had any miracle stories, but I happened to bump into him one December Sunday at the annual Angel Tree party* our dear friends Richard and Pam Scurry annually throw in their Fifth Avenue duplex overlooking the Central Park Reservoir. I mentioned I was working on a book about miracles and before you could say “John Cheever,” Peter was telling me that he had seen two magnificent angels at Saint Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue within the past year—and he proceeded to tell the stories with all of the brocaded and filigreed asides one expects from Peter.

  If Peter defies one’s idea of the sort of person who would see angels, Saint Thomas’s Fifth Avenue church doubly defies one’s idea of the kind of place where someone might see them. It is as Anglo-Catholic Episcopal and Manhattanite upscale as any church could be. Peter told me he had adopted Saint Thomas’s as his church in 1975 on his return from Oxford University. As a boy he discovered the glories of English cathedral choir at Saint Albans Abbey where his father lived. After reading Henry James during the day, he would end the day climbing the hill and listening to choral evensong while sitting in choir.
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br />   Peter said his first sighting took place on the fourth Sunday in Advent. The church was of course crammed full of what Peter called “clubbable” types, hat-wearing ladies who lunch and so on. Peter said he was seated where he usually sits, in the fourth or fifth row on the aisle—on the Epistle side of the church, as he called it, because that’s where the Epistle is read during the liturgy. They were singing a hymn when it happened. Peter said it was suddenly as if the optometrist had flipped the lenses during an examination, as when they say, Is it better now? Or now? Suddenly Peter was seeing differently. In fact, it seems that he was getting a look into another dimension.

  “I saw an absolutely huge angel standing right by the memorial for the victims of the terrorist attack on 9/11,” he told me. “The memorial has a quote from Queen Elizabeth that says, ‘The price we pay for love is grief.’ And the then Archbishop of Canterbury, John Carey, had sent along a stone from Canterbury Cathedral itself, and that’s embedded there along with the queen’s quote. A member of our parish had died during the attack on the Twin Towers.”

  Since it was the fourth Sunday in Advent, Peter told me, Saint Thomas’s was of course doing the famous Milner-White “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,” where angels are spoken of in scripture and song. Like many things, it’s famous once you’re familiar with it, which we now all are. In any case, as the rector and other clergy processed, they would stop at an assigned spot and read a lesson and then everyone would sing a carol and then the procession would move on to the next assigned spot. Peter said he saw the angel right at that point where the procession was going by the pulpit. Peter had never seen an angel before. He said with typical exactness that it was thirty feet high and that it stood about that same distance—thirty feet—from where he was sitting—or standing, since they were singing a hymn. “It expanded my mind, because it looked like super HD. The colors and reality of it were illuminated and exceptional like the reality of Heaven in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce,” he said. “It had huge wings and held a huge sword and wore a suit of armor, and the colors were just dazzling: golds and blues and reds. It sort of looked like fine needlepoint, but of course it wasn’t. But it was incredible. It was just sort of looking over the whole congregation. This thing was huge.” Peter said that he was utterly thrilled and “just completely bathed in its fearsome and awesome beauty.”