Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  Brad says that the whole thing was tremendously startling, to say the least, because it was sudden and he never saw any of it coming. He is emphatic in saying that it was not a sweet, soft experience; it was so overwhelming that he says the only word that can be used to describe it accurately is “fear.” A sheer sense of fear came over him, he says, because “I began to feel as though something was controlling me,” he says. “And I felt that if it didn’t stop, I was going to literally be obliterated, to explode. I even had to find my thoughts in the midst of this and pray ‘God help me!’ At this point I felt a voice inside me remind me that fear was never from God and that I was safe and could experience this as long as I chose, that I had the power to stop when I chose and that is exactly what I did. I reached a point where I felt spent.”

  Brad says as this continued he grew increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable because of what the rest of the congregation would make of what was happening. He could only imagine what all of them were witnessing from their own points of view. It was so utterly mind-blowing and outrageous that he knew it must have been frightening and awesome to them as well.

  “And so,” he said, “as quickly and unexpectedly as it had started, I stopped. I slowly raised my head, opened my eyes and prepared to try to explain to everyone what I just went through and to tell them to not be afraid. But when I looked around, still being serenaded by the end of the horrible harmonica solo, I realized something even more amazing. No one—and I mean no one—had the slightest idea anything had taken place. No one was staring; no one was in awe; no one had even moved from his or her original place.”

  This itself was almost as amazing to Brad as what had just happened—the idea that the God of the universe had just reached down in a display of frightening and awesome power and majesty, and had palpably and physically touched one of his children in this overwhelming way in the midst of a crowd. And none of them knew it but Brad himself.

  After he opened his eyes, he wasn’t sure what to do. He was actually flushed from the experience and he heaved a huge sigh, but he really wanted desperately to scream out to everyone who was there about what had just happened. It was so huge and so overwhelming and beyond anything he had ever hoped God might do in all those prayers he had prayed over the years. God almighty, the creator of the universe, just now had come down and revealed himself in such power! But Brad didn’t say anything. He just stayed there in his seat, in complete awe, thinking about what had just happened. The service continued as though nothing had just happened—and that was that.

  But throughout the service, Brad could think of nothing else. The moment the service was over he buttonholed his pastor and tried to describe what had taken place, assuming that if anyone could appreciate it and understand it, the pastor could. “But he just kind of smiled,” Brad says, and “told me that was nice, and went on his merry way. That’s when I realized that for the rest of my life, I will have experienced something without explanation that had never happened to me before and will likely never happen again.”

  He reiterates that what happened to him is just like what happened to a number of the characters in the Bible, who experienced something all alone, just between them and God. People could believe them or not believe them, but there was nothing they could do but try and explain it and know that they were the only ones who had experienced it.

  More than twenty-five years later, Brad still puzzles over what happened that morning. It was the most extraordinary physical and spiritual experience of his life, but sometimes even he almost wonders if it really happened. He knows it did, but it is hard not to wonder about what it was and what it meant.

  “Why would God choose me,” he asks, “to do this unique event, on that day, without warning?” And Brad wondered why God would then disappear back to that familiar but frustrating place where we cannot see or feel him, though we now know he is there. If Brad ever doubted God was there, though, he didn’t anymore.

  “It seems that on that one special Sunday,” Brad says, “God almighty wanted me to experience just how much he loves me, that he was in fact real, and that one day I will ‘know [him] as I am known [by him].’ I will see clearly and not through a clouded lens—and all because this skeptical, pessimistic magician did the one thing God asked me to do. Obey.”

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, NEW YORK CITY

  Though only in her forties, my friend Lolita Jackson has already lived an extraordinary and dramatic life. I met her in 2007, when she had a high-level post in New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. She was also then thriving as a leader at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, founded by Tim Keller. In 2009, I accompanied Lolita and the small group she was leading on an Easter missions trip to Germany, where we sang in a gospel group at church services in Berlin and Hamburg. Over time I learned the dramatic backstory of this amazingly successful African-American woman.

  When Lolita was six months old, she lost her mother, who was mentally ill, and was in and out of institutions for years afterward. Lolita was therefore raised by her grandmother in what were trying circumstances, including tremendous strife and poverty.

  At the age of eight, Lolita had a supernatural experience. She saw a vision of her future in which she was living in New York City, speaking to large crowds, and somehow involved in ministry. But this was all far away from her present difficulties. In the meantime, she was bussed to an integrated school in the Central New Jersey suburbs, where she was the target of bullying and teasing by some white students, while her extreme intelligence and inclusion in honors classes made her the target of some fellow African-Americans, who mocked her for behaving “white.” It was only in college—she was accepted to Yale and other Ivy League schools, but finally chose Penn—that Lolita began to leave behind the pain of her childhood. But for some reason, God’s call on her life—as shown to her in that childhood vision—seemed oppressive to her at that time, so she deliberately adopted a lifestyle designed to escape it, or at least to keep it at arm’s length. Her successes at Penn led to an auspicious career in the world of finance and she moved to New York City, as the vision had indicated she would. The other parts of that vision, especially the idea of somehow being involved in ministry, remained far from her.

  Lolita was working in the Twin Towers in Manhattan when the first World Trade Center bombing took place in 1993. This incident has been so eclipsed by the horrors of what happened eight years later, that it’s hardly remembered. Six people were killed, but for most of the thousands in the building, it was eventually remembered mostly as a large inconvenience, something that became a bonding experience for those who went through it. At the time, however, it was frightening enough. Lolita would never forget the experience of walking down seventy-two flights of stairs in darkness and smoke, not knowing whether they would make it all the way down, nor what would await them at the bottom. But once the experience was over it seemed to evaporate. Everyone assumed they would never go through anything like it again.

  Eight years later, when the horrors of the event now known as 9/11 unfolded, Lolita was still working in the Twin Towers. This time, she nearly died. She was working on the seventieth floor of the South Tower in the building known as 2 World Trade when the first plane hit. What followed would change her life.

  At this time, Lolita still believed in God and attended church. She had never quite turned her back on God, but neither was she in any way eager to live out the vision she had seen so many years before. She was consumed with work and in her great professional successes was running further and further from the painful memories of her childhood. She felt these successes and the accolades that came with them had become her identity.

  On the morning of that September 11, Lolita’s department was in a meeting in a conference room on the southwest corner of the seventieth floor. The view was spectacular, and included the southern portion of the North Tower. Work started early for most of the people in finance in low
er Manhattan. Lolita was waiting for her turn to speak when the first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 A.M. She was staring out the window when the screaming mass of the commercial jetliner hit the building at six hundred miles per hour.

  Lolita saw the tremendous fireball explode, and moments later an infinity of papers began to flutter down from the openings in the building made by the plane and explosion. Those who saw it from the ground immediately appreciated the tragedy and horror of what they had just seen, but no one knew what had really happened. News reports said that it had likely been a small plane that hit the building. But due to the side of the building they were on, Lolita and her colleagues never saw the plane, only the explosion.

  But they didn’t have time to think about it. Everyone in Lolita’s meeting was there in 1993 when the two explosions rocked the buildings from below, so the moment they saw what happened they knew they must get out of the building without delay. Walking those seventy-two flights of stairs eight years earlier had seemed to take forever. There was no time to lose.

  “From that moment on,” Lolita said, “God was a very real presence to me, as though he were holding my hand throughout my entire escape.”

  A man named Robert was a close colleague of Lolita’s at work and she began walking down the stairs with him. As they were walking down the stairs, Robert kept trying to call his wife on his cell, but because the stairwells themselves were concrete, it was impossible to get a signal. Lolita remembered saying this to him. They had walked down eleven flights and were on the fifty-ninth floor when everyone was instructed to exit the stairwell and take an elevator to the forty-fourth floor “skylobby.” But Robert very much wanted to reach his wife, so as he and Lolita exited the stairwell, he told her that he was going to find an empty office on that floor and quickly call his wife to let her know he was all right. Lolita was planning to go with him and was on the verge of doing so when a voice spoke to her clearly, saying, “Don’t go with him!” The moment she heard it, Lolita knew it was God’s voice. So instead of continuing on with Robert, she told him she would meet him on the forty-fourth floor and walked toward the elevators while Robert went off to find an office for his phone call.

  Lolita took the elevator and as she came out onto the forty-fourth-floor skylobby, she saw that there were hundreds of people standing and awaiting further instructions. She was standing amid this crowd when—at 9:03—the second plane hit. This one struck their building—the South Tower—thirty-three floors above them. Lolita remembered that the building didn’t move back and forth from the impact. Instead, it simply moved several feet in one direction. To the hundreds of people standing there in the forty-fourth-floor skylobby, it felt for all the world as though the whole building was coming down. Lolita said that was the only moment she thought she was going to die. “But I was suddenly overcome with a sense of peace,” she said. “I knew that if I were to die at that moment, I would be okay and would go to Heaven. I had never viscerally felt that before. Then the building righted itself and I absolutely knew I was going to get out. I was perfectly calm.”

  But Lolita saw that immediately after the building had righted itself, everyone began streaming toward one stairwell. Lolita in that moment had a sense that God was telling her to go to another stairwell, closest to where the building had been hit. Because of her experience in descending the stairs eight years before, she knew it would slow things down if everyone took the same stairwell. So she opened the door to the other stairwell and saw that it was well lit, with no debris to block their path. “These are clear!” she screamed, so everyone else could hear her, and immediately about fifty people followed. “I led people down that stairwell and tried to encourage them not to think about the trek,” she said. “When we reached the fifteenth floor, I suggested we call out the floors as though it were New Year’s Eve: ‘Fifteen!’ ‘Fourteen!’ ‘Thirteen!’ . . .”

  When Lolita finally exited the stairwell she was on the mezzanine floor, which overlooked the plaza level, where the debris from both planes had landed. There were also mangled bodies of those who had already jumped from the buildings, and here and there were fires. “[But] God trained my eyes on something else,” Lolita remembered. There were daily concerts in the plaza area, so there were always several hundred chairs set up. “Somehow, in the midst of the chaos, all the chairs were still standing,” she recalled, “and I kept looking at them wondering how that was the case. I never saw anything else while looking out onto the plaza, even though it was a scene of horrors and devastation.”

  Lolita finally exited the building at precisely 9:26. She was told not to look up and not to use her cell phone, just to keep walking. She had walked two blocks before she turned around to see the unfathomable destruction. For her it was as though the end of the world had come at last. People were praying in the streets, calling out to God, while far up in each of the towers the flames were raging out of control. There was a level of chaos utterly unprecedented in most people’s lives. Lolita now stood there alone, trying to take it all in, wondering what had happened and what was happening now. She remembered just standing there in the middle of the street, staring up at the fires as black smoke poured from the gashes in the two buildings. It was an incomprehensible sight, something simply inconceivable. Suddenly, as she stood there, Lolita heard the voice of someone she knew. It was a man who had done some consulting work for her company. He explained to her what had happened and then emphatically urged her to go home immediately. “Most of these people can’t get home,” he said, “but you live in Manhattan and the subways are still running.”

  Lolita had never considered leaving the area, but somehow in response to the man’s forceful tone, she began walking toward the nearest subway entrance, about one hundred feet away. It was 9:50 as she walked down the subway stairs. About one minute later a train arrived and Lolita got on. Later she learned that this was the last subway train to go through that station. A few minutes later all the trains were stopped, and at 9:59 the first building collapsed.

  Lolita realized that if her friend had not implored her to leave the area, she would have been caught with so many others running from that dark gray cloud of dust and perhaps dodging the debris that shot out at three hundred miles per hour. She would later learn of many people who in those few minutes experienced profound, life-altering trauma: debilitating physical effects from breathing the choking dust, having to run for their lives and duck under cars when the buildings collapsed, and being almost eye-to-eye with the broken bodies of people who had jumped from the North Tower.

  Lolita later learned that Robert—who on the fifty-ninth floor had gone off to call his wife—had been killed. He entered an elevator just three minutes after Lolita did, but while he was on that elevator the second plane hit the building and the elevator cable snapped. Lolita knew that if she had gone with him and had gotten onto that elevator with him three minutes later, she would have died too. Lolita said that the “realization of that—of God clearly keeping me out of harm’s way—changed me forever.”

  It was two years before she was able to incorporate that change fully in her life. Following 9/11 and hearing God’s voice as she did, and because of this having her life spared, Lolita increasingly came to see her work as an “idol,” something that was keeping her from what God had for her. Over the next two years, she felt that she was “finally free to be fully used in ways God wanted for me all along.”

  Lolita had attended Redeemer Church in New York City, but her extreme dedication to her job kept her from being much involved there. Now she decided to join a “fellowship group, “to help her through the great transition of leaving Wall Street.” As often happens with Lolita, she soon became a leader of the group, and through that became a leader at Redeemer itself, joining their “diaconate” and leading a number of missions trips, including the one that I went on with her. She became involved in a number of ministries and began speaking all over the country at Christian c
onferences and events, just as she had seen in the vision when she was eight. Her previous goal of becoming a managing director at her old job now seems to her like a very small thing when compared with the life she now has, serving God with her tremendous energy and talents.

  “In the darkest moment I knew he was right there,” she says, “and that is something I always know, every day.”

  15

  HOW MIRACLES CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

  We human beings live in the natural world, the world of nature and matter and time. To fathom what it might mean for something to come into our world of space and time from beyond that world of space and time is not easy. But if we believe there is a God who created this world of space and time, we have already accepted the idea of the miraculous.

  The major miracles in the Bible are clear examples of this concept. Jesus’s birth in the stable in Bethlehem—what we call the Incarnation—is the typical example of eternity entering time. God, who is by definition outside time and space, who is separate from his creation of time and space, suddenly enters time and space in the form of a human newborn. But actually this is a poetic statement and not at all accurate. Eternity entered time not at Christmas in the stable in Bethlehem, when Jesus came out of her womb, but rather in that moment when God touched Mary’s womb and a human zygote formed therein. It was actually in that second that God came into this world and not nine months later.