by Eric Metaxas
But it was during the 1980s, when John held a position with the DeMoss Foundation, that the following story took place. John was working for the foundation as project director for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, and later worked as director of international ministries. In this capacity he found himself traveling with two people: Nancy DeMoss, the widow of Arthur DeMoss; and Scott Hall, who was also working for the foundation at that time. (He has since had a successful business career and is now retired.) Scott spoke Mandarin Chinese fluently, and John spoke Cantonese fluently and Mandarin quite well.
The three of them had traveled to the city of Changsha, the capital of the Hunan province and the place where Mao Tse-Tung was famously converted to Communism. It was very difficult to travel there at that time. They had come to visit some missionaries who were running a computer training center there. One had to have a very good reason to be in China at that time, and this was what these people did to be able to live there as missionaries. When John and his companions had completed their visit, they went to the airport to board their plane back to Hong Kong. They were scheduled to go on a trip from Hong Kong to the Philippines in just a few days. But when they arrived at the Changsha airport, they discovered that their flight to Hong Kong was delayed.
So they waited in the airport. Nancy DeMoss was friends with the legendary football coach Joe Gibbs, who was that very day coaching his Washington Redskins in the Super Bowl (this was 1982 or 1983, since the Redskins played in the Super Bowl both years). Because they had time to kill, the three of them tried to figure out if they could somehow get the Super Bowl on TV at the airport. They couldn’t. And the information they finally got about their flight was that it was not happening at all. Very few people traveled in China by plane at that time, and because of the Chinese New Year, there would be no flights at all that day. In fact, they were informed they would have to wait two or three days before a flight to Hong Kong would be possible.
Always resourceful, John now tried to book a private plane, but that too proved impossible. Finally, in their desperation to get back to Hong Kong they realized they would have to take a train. There was simply no other way. It would be far from ideal for the four-hundred-mile trip—but at least it was possible to get there and to catch their flight to the Philippines. So they left the airport and took a cab to the Changsha train station.
But as they approached the station they saw that train travel was rather popular. For a three-block perimeter around the station there were people camped out everywhere. The sheer numbers were staggering and intimidating. But John knew that at New Year’s in China, everyone traveled back to their hometowns for the holiday—and everyone in China is a lot of people. The taxi could proceed no farther for the crowds, so the three of them got out and carrying their luggage struggled through the masses of people to the station. The inside of the station was equally crowded. John led Nancy and Scott along a serpentine path through the crowds until they were at the line for Canton, which is the city that borders Hong Kong. John figured that they might be able to scalp some tickets from people who were near the front of the line. The ticket for this trip was at that time only nine dollars, so in their desperation, John in his flawless Cantonese offered one hundred dollars to anyone in the line who would give them his ticket! No one was interested. But Nancy DeMoss was a wealthy woman, so John now offered two hundred dollars per ticket! Amazingly there were still no takers. These people wanted desperately to get home for this uniquely important holiday and had likely waited very long for their tickets.
But John always had another idea. He thought perhaps they could bluff their way into the VIP area at the train station and might have some success getting a ticket there. They were well-dressed and affluent Westerners. Who knew what they might be able to do? John told Scott and Nancy to follow him up the long marble staircase to the VIP entrance and not to make eye contact with the policemen who were stationed at the top of the steps in front of it. They should just keep walking like they knew exactly what they were doing. The policemen tried to stop them, but even as they did so, John led the charge, literally pushing the policemen to the side. But eventually it became clear that this approach was not working. Rather than defer to the wealthy Westerners, the policemen had become enraged. It was crystal clear that John and his companions were at an impasse, literally and figuratively. They would not be allowed into this VIP area under any circumstances. John now feigned ignorance and apologized profusely to the policemen, speaking in his sparklingly perfect Cantonese, but they remained angry nonetheless. John and Nancy and Scott retreated sheepishly down the marble stairs with their luggage.
Things were certainly now looking grim. After hours of great efforts, nothing had worked. Nancy and Scott at this point decided to go off to the restrooms, asking John to wait with their luggage. While he was standing there, surveying the endless hordes of people, a small, dignified Chinese woman approached him. In absolutely perfectly accented British English—the queen’s English, John said—the woman said: “Good evening. How are you?” She was probably in her fifties, with a pleasant round face, and she wore the standard blue Chinese uniform beneath her opened overcoat. She also wore a blue hat.
“Good evening,” John responded. “I’m fine. How are you?”
“I’m fine. Is there any way I can help you?”
John said, “As a matter of fact, yes. We’re trying to go to Canton.”
“Come with me,” the woman said.
“There are two other people with me. They’ve gone to the restroom and will be right back.”
The woman said, “That’s all right. We will wait.” That a woman should speak such perfect English anywhere in Red China was remarkable, but that she should exist in the city of Changsha seemed inconceivable. When Nancy and Scott returned, the woman said, “Good evening,” to each of them—and then she said, “Follow me.”
With great dignity, she walked immediately toward the marble steps leading up to the VIP area and began to ascend toward the entrance, which was still flanked by the same policemen with whom John and Scott had scuffled moments before. “This ought to be interesting,” John said to Nancy and Scott. But as the woman drew nearer to the policemen, they saluted her, looking straight ahead, and let everyone in. The trio followed her through a room where another person saluted her and let them through a second door. Who was this woman? They now found themselves out on the train platform, where they continued to follow her the entire length of the train. Then she entered the train and led them not to seats but to their very own compartment. It was baffling. At that point the woman said, “Have a nice trip to Canton.”
As John and his companions were putting their luggage away, Nancy said, “I hope you took care of her.” In his confusion and amazement, John had not, so he immediately turned toward the woman to give her the largest tip he had ever given to anyone in his life. But already she was gone. Where had she gone to so quickly? John immediately got off the train to look for her, but he didn’t see her anywhere. So he hurried all the way back to the place where they had come out onto the platform and asked the woman stationed there, “Can you tell me where the woman is with the hat who brought us through here?” But the woman said, “No one with a hat brought you through here.”
John asked her, “Did I come through here?”
“Yes,” the woman said.
“There were four of us,” he said.
“No, there weren’t,” she said. “There were three of you.”
“But where’s the woman with the blue hat and the coat?”
“I didn’t see her,” the woman said. At this point, John was sure he must have been at the wrong door, so he went to the other door nearby.
There he asked another woman, “Did you see me come through this door a few minutes ago?”
“No,” the woman there said, “you came through that door.” She pointed at the other door.
“Did you see m
e come past here?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you see four of us?”
“No, I only saw three of you.”
John was by now getting angry. “You mean to say you didn’t see a little lady with a blue hat and a coat on?”
“No,” the woman said.
At this point, John returned to the train compartment to get Scott. Scott returned with him to the woman and asked her if she had seen the woman and she said, “No, this gentleman already asked that question.”
“Didn’t you see four of us?”
“No.”
“Then why did you let us on the train?”
“Because I was supposed to.”
“But who told you you were supposed to?”
“I just knew I was supposed to.”
So John and Scott went back to their compartment on the train, baffled. The train left and in a little while food was brought to them. They asked, “Who told you to bring food here?” The men said that there was a note in the kitchen that they were supposed to bring food there, to that compartment. And they brought food again and again, the whole of the four-hundred-mile journey to Canton.
When they arrived in Canton, they prepared to get off the train. In China, one presents one’s ticket at the end of the journey, not at the beginning. But of course they had no tickets. They walked to the place where the ticket man was and John said, “We don’t have a ticket.”
The man said, “I know you don’t. Thank you very much. Carry on.” And he waved them through.
In going over this extraordinary story in his mind scores and scores of times, and in talking it over with many people, including his two traveling companions, John came to the conclusion that the only explanation for what happened to them that day was that the woman was an angel in disguise.
13
VARIETIES OF MIRACLES
In the course of collecting the stories for this book I saw that a number of them fit nicely into a category. There were some that would fall neatly into the category of “healing miracles” and others that I might put under the heading of “inner healing.” Then there were some angelic encounters. There were of course conversion miracles. But what of the stories that didn’t fit into any of these categories? What was I to make of them? In the course of thinking about this I marveled at the sheer variety of the stories I had heard and experienced myself.
As we have said earlier, miracles are always examples of God communicating with us in some fashion. The following miracles demonstrate this more than others. But they aren’t just communications. There is a particular intimacy to them, as though God wants more than anything to let us know he is with us. He sees what we are going through and he cares. Furthermore, he is such a big God that he can afford to deal with us on an intimate level, to encourage us and to wink at us and to hold our hands when we need him to do that. He isn’t a busy heavenly father who only has time for the big, important world-changing things. He has time for every one of us and he has time for the details of our lives. In showing us this, he shows us that our lives are important to him. He is not a God who is up in the clouds and who only begrudgingly descends into our world when he must. He wants to communicate with us that if something is important to us, it’s important to him.
THE DREAM THAT HELPED ME WRITE BONHOEFFER
I’ve never told this story publicly before, mainly because it’s a little bit complicated and because it’s so odd. One thing I know: I didn’t make it up.
One night in 2006, I had a very powerful dream. For no reason that made sense logically at the time, it was deeply affecting. I’ve had many dreams over the years, but only one that was anything like this one, and that was my life-changing dream of the golden fish. I tell that story earlier in the book, but for several years before this 2006 dream I hadn’t dreamt much at all. At least I couldn’t remember any dreams, which made this dream that much more affecting.
I dreamt that I was in Germany, in the small village of Großstöbnitz, where my mother grew up, not far from Altenburg, in what was East Germany. It’s where my relatives have lived for centuries. The house where my great-grandparents raised their twelve children is still there. One of those children, my grandmother, was born in that house in 1905, and my mother was born in it in 1934. Our relatives still live there. The tiny village church in Großstöbnitz was built in 1604. Generations of my family have worshiped there. Just up the road is the house where my mother’s favorite aunt—Tante Walli—lived with her family and where my mother spent much of her childhood.
In the summer of 1971, around my eighth birthday, my grandmother and mother and brother and I, along with my aunt—whom we called Tante Eleonore—and two cousins, flew to Germany to visit our relatives. East Germany was tremendously economically depressed, so virtually nothing had changed since World War II. We arrived in Großstöbnitz on a train with a steam locomotive that seemed like something out of the 1920s or earlier. Tante Walli was then seventy-nine years old, and meeting her was like meeting a celebrity. I’d constantly heard about her growing up and now here she was. Her house had no indoor bathroom, just an outhouse, and there were chickens, rabbits, goats, and other animals. For someone of my age at that time it was all a dream come true, as if we had fallen into the pages of a fairy-tale book. My little brother and I became friends with the farmer who lived next door and we would visit him every morning to see his cows in their stalls and to jump from the hayloft down into the hay below. We also spent time playing with our cousin Jürgen, who was a year older than I. My brother and I remember one thing he said often: “Nixon ist schlecht!” Obviously it was something he had learned in his Communist grammar school. It’s the only thing during that glorious summer that reminded us that we weren’t really living in a world outside time.
Großstöbnitz was everything my mother and Tante Eleonore said it was, a magical place a million miles from the modern world of Queens, New York City, where we lived. One day during our time in Großstöbnitz, we went to the seventieth birthday celebration of another of my grandmother’s older sisters, Tante Toni. It was a grand gathering of the whole German side of my family and a number of photographs were taken. I remember it was at that gathering that I formed my first German sentence: “Bitte, gib mir ein Glas Milch.” When we left to go home, we said that we would try to get back the following summer for Tante Walli’s eightieth birthday, but traveling across the Atlantic was expensive and life marched on.
By the time I had my dream in 2006, the summer in Großstöbnitz was a distant memory from thirty-five years earlier. I almost never thought about my German relatives or my German roots. I simply hadn’t stayed connected with that part of my life and background. I’d been to Greece many times to visit my father’s side of the family, but the German side of me had atrophied to the point of near vanishing.
So what did I dream that night in 2006? I dreamt that I was in Großstöbnitz at a party that seemed to be just like the huge birthday party for Tante Toni. All the relatives were there and they were taking pictures. But in the dream I somehow realized it was all taking place at some point before I’d ever gotten to Großstöbnitz. It must have been 1968 or 1969 or 1970, because in the dream I knew I was five or six years old. So when all the relatives gathered for a photograph, I realized I wasn’t really there yet. I stood on the edge of it all, wishing I could be in the photograph they were taking, wishing I could be a part of the whole family standing there, but in the dream I knew I just wasn’t there yet. So I stood outside the photo, as it were. I powerfully longed to be in it, but I couldn’t. Then I woke up.
But after I woke up, the longing to be in that photograph continued to stick with me, as did the whole dream. It was very powerful. It all had such a strange urgency to it that I felt I must call my mother and tell her about it. I don’t normally do things like that, but the vividness of it all had somehow affected me and for some unknown reason I felt compelled to
call my parents and speak to my mother about it. So I called. But there was no answer. Where in the world would my mother be at nine on a Saturday morning? She was always home then. The only explanation for her not picking up the phone was that she must have driven to my aunt’s house on Long Island for the weekend. So, dying to speak with her as soon as possible, I dialed my aunt. When my aunt picked up the phone, she told me that my mother wasn’t there either. But she did know where my mother was. My mother was driving to Madison, Connecticut, to visit my brother. I guess she’d spoken to my aunt just before she’d left Danbury and it sounded like she had left only a little while ago, so it would be over an hour before I could speak with her. But the burning desire to tell the story of my dream was such that an hour seemed like an eternity. So I decided to tell the dream to my aunt, whom I really hardly ever spoke with on the phone. But her affection for Großstöbnitz was equal to my mother’s, and for whatever reason—I still cannot fathom the reason—I told my aunt the dream.
When I got to the part about being just outside the photograph and unable to be in the photograph, explaining that it was taking place a couple of years before I’d ever actually been in Großstöbnitz—probably 1969 or so—my aunt said, “Gee, that’s strange . . .”
“What’s strange?” I asked.
“The photograph.”
“What about it?”
“Just yesterday Kurt [her husband] got a photograph like that sent to us from our relatives in Großstöbnitz. They e-mailed it to us. And it’s from around that time.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a photograph of all the relatives in Großstöbnitz and it’s from around that time. They sent it to us yesterday and he printed it out last night.”