by Mary C Neal
As soon as I finished the prayer, I found myself at the surface, but I didn’t make one stroke to get there. Then a young man swam over to me to try to save me. We were both exhausted, so we alternated holding each other up until we got back to the beach. I thanked him a lot and said, “I’m sure glad you were at the beach to help save me!”
He said, “Well, I wasn’t going to come to the beach today. I was tired of the beach. But as soon as I decided not to go to the beach, a voice spoke into my mind and said, ‘You have to go to the beach today. You have to go.’ So I did.”
I believe God saved me that day and answered my prayer from twenty-five feet underwater.
—BART, HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA
Have you experienced nudges? Most people have, whether we’re conscious of them or not. I responded to many nudges in the writing of my first book, but one in particular stands out.
After a week of kayaking in Arizona on the Colorado River with my family, they continued on, but I hiked out. My plan was to slowly drive back to Wyoming, visiting friends along the way. On the second day of driving, I suddenly felt a strong internal urging to return home as quickly as possible. I responded by continuing to drive rather than stopping for the night and arrived home a full day earlier than anticipated.
Early the next morning, the phone rang. I was exhausted from the trip and since no one expected me to be home, it would have been easy for me to ignore the phone. But again, an intense prompting broke through my sleepiness, and I answered. It was an agent who, uncharacteristically, had gone to her office early that morning and felt a nudge to violate her personal rule of never looking at e-mails before 11:00 a.m. She was calling me, she said, because she had received a “junk” e-mail from a television show asking if she knew anyone who had experienced near death. The inquiry required a response by that very morning. So even though she knew I was scheduled to be out of town, she decided to phone.
Do you see what happened? Both she and I had responded to nudges that were sent our way. I did appear on that television show. It was an appearance that led to a long series of opportunities to share my story about God’s love and the truth of His promises.
I know what it’s like to not respond to a nudge as well. Several months ago, I lost an opportunity to be of service to a friend, share God’s love with her, and be part of the miracle of her life. A high school friend named Jenni had greatly impacted the course of my life. She was reliable, God focused, clean living, and compassionate and touched many with her quick smile and generous spirit. Her impact on my life was seemingly out of proportion to what our friendship had been, and I recently felt nudged to tell her just how important she had been to my spiritual growth. I had not spoken to her in more than twenty years and had no idea where she might be living, but I halfheartedly tried to track her down.
In reality, I didn’t really want to acknowledge the internal nudge or listen to the whispers in my head. I felt awkward and silly telling a grown woman I no longer knew how significant she had been in my life’s journey. I kept putting it off until the nudging became impossible to ignore. I eventually found her on a social media site and crafted a long letter to her. When I finally logged on to the site to send her my message, I was stunned to discover that she was currently on a ventilator in an intensive care unit. She died the following day without knowing of the blessing she had been to me.
Orchestrated events, many times brushed off as mere coincidence, are often used to bring about a change in direction or a miracle, but sometimes they just seem to be God’s way of showing His presence in our lives. They often encourage us and help us to develop trust. Wouldn’t you feel more confident in God’s thoughts toward you if the following two experiences had happened to you?
About ten years ago, I was in the depths of terrible depression following a devastating divorce. I was an agnostic at that time, though beginning to question that belief. I was driving on the highway, in total despair, and I said out loud, “God, if you’re real, if you actually exist, show me a sign, a really obvious sign, and then maybe I’ll believe.”
At that precise moment, I felt a loving presence was with me, and I saw a stand of trees in a field with a gap, revealing a billboard. On this large billboard, the single word “Jesus” appeared. Stunned, I then said, “Are you really here?” And then a semitruck changed lanes and was directly in front of me. On the back of the truck was the phrase, “Right on time.”
—JUSTIN, AMARILLO, TX
When I was thirty-three years old, my life was spiraling out of control. I hated everything about my life and everyone in it. I was just not content with my life, and I was ready for something to change the path I was going down. After taking the babysitter home, I went to a local park and sat on a park bench in the dark. I cried my eyes out and turned to the Lord in prayer and asked Him to change my life or end it. I was at my wit’s end.
A “thought” came to me to go to our church, right then. I knew that they never kept the doors opened to the church, but I felt compelled to go anyway. I was amazed that the church doors opened when I pulled on them. I walked down to the altar, knelt, and begin to pray to God for forgiveness, peace, and to take my terrible burden of worry, depression, and despair. This part of my story is a little foggy because I don’t know if it was a physical manifestation or in my spirit, but I saw a bright light and felt a very warm feeling in my body. I don’t know if my eyes were open or not. I just know that I was blinded by its brightness and warmth. It was incredible. I have never felt anything like it before or since. It instantly gave me peace that passes all understanding.
—DAVID, LOS ANGELES, CA
Of course not everything we take as a nudge or an orchestrated event is from God. But if a thought does not recede, my advice is to pay attention. More often than not, nudges—especially repeated ones—are spiritual invitations to be part of a miracle waiting to happen.
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE SKEPTICS
As I mentioned at the outset of the chapter, our first reaction to the miraculous—even if we are people of deep faith—is nearly always doubt. Take the preceding story from David. Most of us immediately start to pick it apart. We wonder, could anyone else corroborate the events? For that matter, is David telling the truth? It seems that we almost reflexively search for overlooked details that could explain everything.
Actually, David himself did exactly that. He assumed the church doors had been inadvertently left unlocked, so he called the church the following day to ask. He was assured that security guards lock and check the doors each night and had done so last night as well. That’s when David concluded that human-placed locks cannot hinder God’s desires. For him, the experience opened up his belief system to the reality of a near, personally loving, and powerful God.
Consider one of the most famous miracles stories of all time—the birth of Jesus. Ignoring how Mary’s pregnancy fulfilled long-standing prophecy, some skeptics claim that the virgin birth was just a lie devised by Mary and her cousin to cover up a sexual relationship with her boyfriend, Joseph. When we don’t want to believe what a person has said or experienced, we cast aspersions on that individual’s credibility and motives, looking for any explanation other than the possibility of a supernatural event.
Perhaps you read the story of nine-year-old Annabel Beam or saw the movie Miracles from Heaven about her experience. Annabel suffered from two rare, painful, and life-threatening intestinal diseases until she accidentally fell thirty feet into a hollowed-out cottonwood tree. She hit her head and had an NDE before being rescued five hours later. When she asked Jesus if she could stay with him, she was told there were plans for her that could not be fulfilled in heaven, but that there would be nothing wrong when she was sent back. Indeed, she no longer has pain, has not been hospitalized, and takes no medications. By all accounts, she has been cured of her diseases.2
Rather than accepting Annabel’s account, people have tried to discredit her by suggesting that she suffered a concussion and had a hallucina
tion, probably suffered from Munchausen’s disease (a psychological disorder in which people fake symptoms of a disease to undergo medical treatment), and, of course, is only interested in making money from publicizing her lies.
This response seems excessive, but it is really no different from skeptics in Bible times. When Jesus restored sight to a man who had been blind from birth, people first claimed the newly sighted man was not the same man. Then they assumed he had never really been blind at all. When they could find no alternative explanation for his newly restored sight, they rejected him by hurling insults. But none of their objections were really about the man or his vision. In rejecting him, they were desperately trying to protect themselves from the possibility that miracles in the here and now could actually happen, or that Jesus might actually be God in the flesh. (You can read about it in John 9.)
It’s worth asking ourselves the same question. Could our own reluctance to believe the reality of present-time miracles actually be a reflection of our own self-protectiveness? Because truly believing that miracles still happen could definitely upset our status quo, right? After all, if we accept that God is undeniably present, loving, and actively working his wonders around us, it might compel many of us to live quite differently than we are doing right now.
DIVINE APPOINTMENTS
Finally, in the category of “small miracles” are what some have called divine appointments—what feels then or later like a meeting or conversation that’s been arranged in heaven. I always look for these God-arranged encounters in the midst of delays, slow traffic, or missed flights, and I often experience something beautiful.
A couple of years ago, I was on a tight schedule when I arrived with a translator for an interview at a Mexican television station. The appointed time came and passed. As more time passed, the translator became more and more agitated, as she thought about being late to our next appointment. Although she wanted to leave, I sensed that we were meant to stay, so we continued to wait.
A man who was not associated with the television station eventually walked into the lobby. Despite my natural inclination not to chat with strangers, I just knew I was meant to speak with him. Within minutes, he was in tears as he shared the sadness in his life. His mother had recently died, his wife was gravely ill in the hospital, and he felt alone. He had stopped going to church, as he was unable to see God in his sadness. In sharing some of my experiences with him, I was able not only to offer him the comfort and assurance of knowing he would see his mother again, but also to help him see the beauty that was already coming of the situation—the events in his life had prompted a reconciliation with his estranged father and initiated a beautifully developing relationship between his father and his children.
The very moment my conversation with this man concluded, a producer arrived to announce that the television station was ready for me. Until I return to heaven, I will not know the long-term impact of my conversation with this man. But I believe this was a divine appointment and that my forty-minute delay provided the moment for a small miracle to occur.
THE FIFTH LESSON THAT HEAVEN REVEALS
Big miracles happen sometimes; personal miracles happen often. God invites us to notice His miraculous presence all around.
TO HAVE OUR SIGHT RESTORED
I’m confident that stories like these—perhaps less dramatic, but no less real—are present in your past, or among your friends and family. They may include spiritual nudges, orchestrated events and divine appointments, or miracles of any shape or size. Regardless of whether these God-arranged events are dramatic, subtle, inconvenient, recognizable, or unnoticed, they occur all the time. True, many of us have been trained by cultural and religious assumptions to miss them entirely. Perhaps, like the blind man in John’s gospel, we need our sight restored. We’ll look more deeply in Part Two at how anyone can wake up to the miraculous. I promise that with practiced intention and the help of the Spirit, a little digging can bring them to light in your life, and with them comes the opportunity to strengthen your faith and trust in God’s promises.
Miracles happen. As Albert Einstein famously said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” I hope you will join me in seeing that miracles large and small are for everyone and occur far more often than we even realize. If we conscientiously work through our doubts and open our hearts to what God is up to, we’ll see that the breathtaking realities of heaven are much closer for each of us than we have dared to believe.
Chapter 9
ANGELS WALK AMONG US
“Praise the Lord, you his angels,
you mighty ones who do his bidding,
who obey his word.”
—PSALM 103:20
Remember the two Chilean men who suddenly appeared on the riverbank just as I was resuscitated? I am convinced they were angels, and now I’ll tell you why.
We were in an isolated spot on the river, yet they did not come to the bank by boat, nor did they slash their way through a bamboo thicket. According to my friends who were fervently performing CPR, the men just appeared. One moment, they were not there—the next moment, they were standing among my friends. They were wearing clothing typical of rural Chilean workers—handmade woolen sweaters with rough-hewn work pants. Other than the fact of their presence, they were neither flashy nor unusual.
Without speaking or being spoken to, these men, along with my friends, began to crash through the thick bamboo to create a way out to the road above. Step by step, they bushwhacked through the bamboo and clambered up the steep hillside, all while carrying my body on a kayak used as a stretcher. After slow progress up the hillside, then along a small animal trail, our group finally emerged onto a dirt road.
As I wrote earlier, at the exact spot where we emerged onto the road, an ambulance was parked, waiting. Although he seemed to follow no typical protocol, the ambulance driver, as if fully expecting us, silently and calmly sprang into action at our arrival. He did not administer any medical assistance to me, even though I was fading in and out of consciousness and was clearly in distress; he merely loaded me into the back of the ambulance, walked to the front of the vehicle, and quickly began driving. One person asked the driver what he had been doing there, to which he replied, “I don’t know, just waiting.” Other than this, he never spoke. The driver appeared to be kind and middle-aged. Ambulance drivers in Chile typically wear uniforms, but this driver was wearing sophisticated slacks and a little lab-coat-type jacket. To my companions, everything seemed odd and out of place.
Once I had been transferred to the ambulance, the Chilean men who had helped transport me up the hillside seemed to melt into the scenery. My friends returned to the river later in the day to look for them but found no sign of their presence, and none of the local villagers knew of them.
Angels come, and angels go.
The ambulance finally arrived at a little medical clinic that had only recently been established. It was open only once every six weeks, yet it happened to be open when I arrived. There wasn’t an x-ray machine, but x-rays were not needed to know that both of my legs were quite obviously broken—moving like a rag doll, the bones and ligaments around both of my knees were totally unstable on examination. My husband found few medical supplies inside the clinic, but he did find some plaster with which he was able to fabricate long splints for both of my legs before loading me into a pickup truck to begin our journey home. After I had been taken inside the clinic, the ambulance driver did not get out of the vehicle, but just drove away. No questions asked and none answered.
As I recounted in the previous chapter, I have been asked numerous times what I think really happened on the riverbank. Who were the Chilean men? What was the ambulance doing there? And how did Bill know where to go?
My answer is always the same: God intervened. After carefully considering all the circumstances and possibilities, I believe the kayaker who went running into the bamboo forest was
divinely guided to where Bill was reading, and their perfectly timed arrival where we emerged was no coincidence. I believe the Chilean men who carried me away from the river and the ambulance driver waiting by the road for us were divinely sent by God to fulfill His plan for me.
And that’s why I conclude they were angels—divine messengers on assignment from God.
I’ll never know all the reasons God chose to intercede on my behalf that day. But I do know the outcome, and I’m deeply grateful. The writer of the book of Hebrews poses a most revealing rhetorical question. He asks, “Are not all angels ministering spirits?” (1:14).
In my experience, the answer is yes!
In the previous chapter, we looked at the evidence for the miraculous in our world. On that score, what heaven reveals is clear, and a cause for celebration: God is present and active in supernatural ways in our world—and He wants us to notice!
In this chapter we see that God often accomplishes the miraculous by asking powerful emissaries we know as angels to cross over into our physical world.
MESSENGERS ON ASSIGNMENT
Has your life been “touched by an angel”? Almost certainly. The Bible describes the multitudes of angels who wait at all times to do God’s bidding among us (see, for example, Genesis 28:12, Exodus 23:20, Matthew 26:53, and John 1:51). In this chapter, I’ll share stories—lots of them—that others have shared with me, and for an important reason: Waking up to the unseen all around us can radically change how we go about our daily lives. I learned in heaven that you and I are never alone, never unnoticed, never far from one of God’s beautiful and powerful “ministering spirits.”
