Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  I believe that when it comes to the stories I will tell in the following chapters we are faced with a similar situation. We can perhaps imagine that the people telling these stories are simply lying for the purposes of self-aggrandizement or for any other reason. Or we can perhaps imagine that they are simply deceived, so that they are themselves convinced that these things happened, although they didn’t. Or finally, we can conclude that as difficult as they might be to make sense of, they are nonetheless true stories.

  The people telling these stories (I am, of course, one of them) must be carefully considered as either trustworthy witnesses to events or as untrustworthy witnesses to events (or nonevents). We must consider whether what they are saying is an embellishment in toto or an embellishment in part—or no embellishment at all, but simply factual. We must consider the source, as it were, because in a court of law, as one tries to determine the facts of a case, one has to speak to the reliability of the witnesses. If one has a reliable witness, it’s a strong indicator that what that witness is saying actually happened. If one has an unreliable witness, one simply has no way of knowing whether what they are saying happened.

  This is why I’ve chosen to limit myself to telling the stories of people I know personally. This adds a level of trustworthiness to these people, because I am not having to take someone else’s word for it that they are trustworthy. I’ve eliminated a layer of confusion. Had I chosen to tell the stories of people whom I do not know, I might have found far more exotic and incredible miracle stories, but I would not have the satisfaction of knowing that the person telling the story was really and truly trustworthy. So what we have in these pages is limited in scope: stories told to me by people I know personally, and because I know them personally, stories I believe are true.

  But I don’t believe they are true simply because I trust the people who told them to me. I have been told many stories over the years, but not all of them are true. We have to try to get to the bottom of things that people tell us, and I have tried to include only those stories that I believe withstood my initial skepticism and questions. Just because some miracle stories are true doesn’t mean that they all are true.

  The following stories illustrate that these kinds of experiences are not only for mystics—or only for nuns or monks or priests or “certain” people. They illustrate that the God of the universe wants to communicate with every single one of us and that there is not only one way in which he does that. Because he created each of us differently, he will communicate with us individually. Though he is the same God for every one of us, in his tenderness and desire to reach us he is able to speak to us in ways that are very specific to us. The story of my conversion in the next chapter is a particular illustration of that idea. God will never demand that we speak his language; on the contrary, in love he condescends to speak ours. He uses vision and dreams and words and circumstances and experiences to communicate with us, and he wants us to expect that—not to demand it but neither to be closed to it.

  9

  CONVERSION MIRACLES

  I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.

  —JOHN NEWTON, FROM THE HYMN “AMAZING GRACE”

  Christian conversion . . . is a supernatural, radical thing. The heart is changed. And the evidence of it is not just new decisions, but new affections, new feelings.

  —JOHN PIPER

  I changed. I have been turning into a different person since that half minute.

  —JOY DAVIDMAN

  Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self.

  —C. S. LEWIS

  I have often heard people say that the biggest miracle of all is someone’s conversion from nonbelief to belief, or that the greatest evidence of a miracle is the changed life that results when someone goes from nonbelief to belief. But other people are of the mind that people can’t change, that we are who we are and that’s that. When someone claims to have changed, they assume he is probably kidding himself or, more likely, trying to fool others. Examples of this view arise when convicted criminals claim to come to faith. How convenient for them! the cynics cry, assuming the actual point of these claims is to persuade the judge or warden or parole board to be lenient with them. This can surely be the case, and yet I can think of several people who really did genuinely come to faith after committing crimes. What shall we make of them?

  One was my dear friend Chuck Colson. Chuck was the special counsel to Richard Nixon, one of the infamous “president’s men” who took amoral political ambition to new heights, and who eventually fell spectacularly in that historic debacle and “long, national nightmare” known as the Watergate scandal. Chuck was called the White House “hatchet man” and was said to be willing to “run over his grandmother” to get the president reelected. But just before everything fell apart in public, things were falling apart privately for the former marine. Something in him began to wonder about God, and in the summer of 1973, over the course of a few weeks, he was dramatically converted.

  But when word got out that the take-no-prisoners tough guy had become a born-again Christian, the news media had a field day. No one would believe this nasty political operative had really changed his stripes. He was lampooned in political cartoons and on late-night television. But, mirabile dictu, it really had happened. In fact, Chuck was so serious about his newfound faith that he refused to take a plea bargain to avoid prison, because he would have to lie. His lawyer thought he was out of his mind to refuse it, but Chuck wouldn’t back down. And so he went to prison. After he got out of prison he decided that God wanted him to spend the rest of his life helping prisoners, which he did when he founded Prison Fellowship. Instead of rebooting a very lucrative legal career with big-name clients, he chose to go back into prisons, and that’s what he did for the rest of his life. You don’t do something like that for thirty-five years just to fool people into thinking you’ve changed. But many still doubted he had changed, and even some of his obituaries didn’t seem able to see the reality of his changed life after all those years. But I knew him personally and saw who he was. His conversion to putting God and others first in his life, to loving his enemies, and to behaving in a way that would glorify God and bless those around him was as deep and authentic as anything one can hope for.

  Still, the belief that someone is inherently bad and utterly beyond the possibility of change persists. If you’ve ever met someone who is really awful—or who at least seems pretty awful— you struggle to imagine they could really turn their lives and their sins over to God and be forgiven and change dramatically. I can see why some thought that about Chuck, and I can think of a few people who fit this bill in my life. I especially remember when I was not yet fifteen, working for a few hours each Friday and Saturday night as a busboy in a Greek diner near our home. Since I was not yet sixteen it was under the table, for tips only, but I needed some cash to buy backpacking equipment, so I’d asked my father if he knew anyone who could use me. He’d suggested a diner not far from our home. It was owned and run by—no kidding—a corrupt Greek Orthodox priest, who had once been our parish priest but who had been sent packing by the parish council. In later years I learned from friends that he had chased waitresses, and eventually he went to prison for tax fraud. Who can doubt that he drove people away from God?

  But as bad as he was, the short-order cook in the diner was worse. He was a short, nasty, brutish Greek named Manolis, who every time I entered the kitchen with my basin of dirty dishes would say vulgar, sexual things to me about women, real and imaginary. He trafficked in nonstop dirty talk, so I didn’t take it personally, disgusting as it was. “Eric, you have gell-friend?” he would ask, leering like a satyr. “You have gell-friend?” Actually I didn’t have “gell-friend,” but to get him off my back I said that I did. Of course, this only stoked the fire. “Eric! Eric! You gell-friend she give you somethin’, eh?” On and on it went. One day Manolis was in the process of
suggestively asking me if I knew the priest’s teenage daughter and began effusing over her looks when the priest came in through the swinging doors and overheard it. But Manolis was a decent enough cook, so the priest only snapped at him: “Ela, sar-rap, vre Boubouna!” So don’t ask me why, but when I think of the sort of unregenerate person whom I cannot imagine ever really changing, for some reason, I think of him.

  But if you purport to be any kind of Christian or person who regards the Bible as divinely inspired, you cannot take that position. According to the Bible, no one is ever really past the possibility of God’s grace. Besides, who are we to know who is and isn’t beyond it? Aren’t there too many examples of people we thought beyond the pale who were not beyond it after all, who really changed and surprised everyone around them?

  The reason so many people regard genuine conversions as miracles is because of the dramatic changes often witnessed in the lives of those converted. As I’ve just said, Chuck Colson went from being a tremendously prideful, hyperaggressive political zealot, to someone humbled and humble who served the poor and the disenfranchised with all of the talents and energies he had once used to claw his way to the top. How had that happened? What could account for that? More dramatically, David Berkowitz, infamous for the “Son of Sam” murders in New York in 1977, years ago had what anyone close to him describes as a deep and thorough conversion to Christian faith, so much so that he refuses to appear before his parole board, believing he doesn’t deserve to be released for what he did.

  Another conversion worth talking about is the conversion of C. S. Lewis, the Oxford don whose writings after his conversion touched many millions of lives.

  THE MIRACLE OF C. S. LEWIS’S CONVERSION

  Conversion is often thought of as something that happens instantly, and it sometimes does happen that way. But it often doesn’t. Even when it happens in a way that appears instant, there is often more to the process than meets the eye. Later in this chapter, I tell of my own experience in being transformed literally overnight, but I can also remember steps along the way to that night, steps that were crucial and that were a part of my having that overnight experience. So on the one hand it happened overnight, and on the other hand it took years. William Wilberforce described his own conversion as “the Great Change,” which I write about in my book Amazing Grace. It consisted of a period of almost two years in which Wilberforce continued to change. But he never references any particular moment when he crossed the line of “conversion.” For all we know, the line he was crossing was so wide that it took him two years to cross it. Who can really say?

  The conversion of C. S. Lewis is a bit like Wilberforce’s. Except for him it doesn’t look as much like a long process as a number of distinct steps. He writes about the culmination of it in his autobiographical memoir, Surprised by Joy. One day he got into the sidecar of his brother Warnie’s motorcycle and they took off for the Whipsnade Zoo. When he got into the sidecar, Lewis says, he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but when he got out of the sidecar at the zoo, he did. At what point, then, in that one-and-a-half-hour motorcycle journey did Lewis cross the fabled line from unbelief to belief? Or was the whole journey of thirty-five miles the crossing of that line? Or was this ride in the sidecar that day simply the final leg of a longer journey? Once again, it’s impossible to say. Lewis himself certainly didn’t know the answer.

  But in Surprised by Joy, Lewis recounts what happened before he got into that sidecar. For him there were several levels of unbelief and belief, and it seems that this is the case with most people who experience conversions, although usually it’s hard to see these steps and articulate them. Lewis was about as perceptive and articulate as anyone who ever lived, so he did write about what he perceived of this journey. But even the great Lewis could see it only dimly.

  Lewis tells us in Surprised by Joy of how as a child he experienced a deep longing for something beyond himself. He uses the German word “Sehnsucht,” but also translates it as the English word “joy.” By way of context, Lewis’s mother died when he was nine. He had prayed hard for her recovery, but she had not recovered. The years that followed were not pleasant ones. The boarding schools to which his father sent him were awful. Then there was the terrible experience of being a soldier in the Great War. Lewis’s time in the trenches, amid the bombs and poison gas and carnage—and seeing his closest friend killed—only hardened his heart toward whatever it was for which he had longed as a child. He became a confirmed atheist. He may not have been especially happy about it, but he simply came to feel that that was the way things were, and he must face them. He was too old to believe in any God. His memory of praying for his mother’s healing, followed by her death, was enough to settle things in his mind.

  But Lewis’s disinterest in the God of the Bible didn’t close him off to the world of fairy tales and myths. He particularly enjoyed and even loved the old Norse sagas. Something in him resonated with them, though he never asked just what that was, and he was sure they were just stories, that they had no bearing on the material world in which we all live. In Surprised by Joy, he writes:

  On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow “rationalism.” Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

  Lewis loved poetry and myth so much that early on he hoped to become a poet. This was in the first decades of the twentieth century, when poetry was still widely read and enjoyed. Lewis wrote under various pen names and even tried his hand at longer verse, including Dymer, an epic poem written in the style of Homer. As a student at Oxford University, Lewis scored an almost unheard-of “triple first” and afterward became an expert in medieval literature, teaching and writing at Oxford about such masterworks as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Spenser’s Fairie Queene.

  While at Oxford, Lewis became friends with J. R. R. Tolkien, who was a devout Roman Catholic. In time, Lewis’s atheism turned to a kind of theism, but it went no further than that. How this happened he hardly knew, but he had put off its happening as long as he could. It was not something he had desired. In a letter to his friend Arthur Greeves, he said: “I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

  There his faith remained until one night when he, Tolkien, and their mutual friend Hugo Dyson took one of their late-night walks on the long wooded path behind Magdalen College in Oxford. The name of this path is “Addison’s Walk” and it is still there, just as it was more than eight decades ago when they frequented it. On September 19, 1931, at one or two in the morning, they were walking on Addison’s Walk when their conversation turned to the subject of myth. Tolkien suggested to Lewis that the story of Christ dying and then rising from the dead was indeed a myth, just as the stories of all those young gods who died and then rose from the dead were also myths. But he suggested to Lewis that the myth of Christ was also true. He suggested that it was the one time in history that a myth had actually happened. This was why he believed it and he encouraged Lewis to think about this as well.

  A true myth. It was something Lewis had never considered. But was it really true? Could it be? That was another story. But there was enough evidence to it that he must at least consider it. If a genius like Tolkien believed it was true, and if the brilliant G. K. Chesterton, whom he so admired, believed it, and if the great writer George MacDonald, whose stories he so admired, had believed it, he must at least consider it.

  Nine days after that walk with Tolkien and Dyson, on the sunny morning of September 28, Lewis and his elder brother Warnie decided to take a trip to the Whipsnade Zoo. Why they did this is lost to history, but what happened that day changed history, because Lewis says that it was during the course of this journey that everything changed for him. It was whilst driving along the roads to the zoo that he crossed the invisible but ultra
real line from not believing into believing, though he knew not how. It was no conscious decision, and yet it happened. He knew that it did. “I have just passed on from believing in God,” he wrote, “to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

  Who can say how such a thing happens? But the effect this had on Lewis over the years to come was profound and extraordinarily far-reaching. For one thing, after he came to faith, he began to articulate that faith in an endless spate of books that have been read by many millions around the globe. His books on apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, have awakened millions to the rationality of Christian faith, while his books of fiction and fantasy, such as the Chronicles of Narnia, have awakened people to the imaginative and mythical side of it. It seems that after these two sides of the faith came together in Lewis’s conversion, he spent the next decades of his life sharing both of them with the world.

  MY CONVERSION

  My own conversion, which I recount in this chapter, was not the classic kind of conversion, although I’ve come to think that there really is no such thing as a “classic conversion.” In my case, my conversion didn’t make me feel especially grateful that Jesus had died for my sins. I didn’t really feel any particular sense of repentance. I didn’t think about what Jesus had done on the cross. I certainly believed in all those things, and knew they were deeply important, but there was no deep sense of those things that led to my conversion as many often describe. Some people would say that I cannot have been converted if those things—which they insist upon—weren’t ticked off on whatever mental form they use to determine who has experienced an actual conversion and who hasn’t.