Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  Ed never forgot this experience, but the effects of it faded. After his junior year at seminary, he decided he couldn’t go back. He finished his degree at Merrimack College and lived in the dorm there. That year, Ed met his future wife, Donna, who was the same year as he and soon became his friend. Donna had grown up in New Jersey and was pursuing a degree in chemistry, with a minor in biology.

  It was only at their graduation in 1978 that Ed realized his feelings for Donna went well beyond friendship, but by then she had already accepted a good job working as a lab technician in Southern California. If Ed wanted to continue their relationship, he would have to move there. Ed had by now realized that he wanted to pursue art and become an illustrator, so he applied and was accepted to the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He moved to Southern California and continued his relationship with Donna, which soon became serious.

  But no sooner had Ed taken a few classes than he came to understand that almost none of the credits from his philosophy BA at Merrimack were transferrable, so he would need to entirely redo his bachelor’s degree. He knew that couldn’t work, nor could he afford it, since there was little financial help to get a second BA. So after a short time he dropped out, and in 1979 he moved in with Donna. They lived a block and a half from the beach in San Diego. Ed led what he recalls as a pretty crazy life, smoking pot and drinking in much of his spare time. But at some point they thought they should settle down, so they planned to move back to the New York area to be closer to their families. Donna landed a job with American Cyanamid in Connecticut as a research chemist, and they moved to an apartment on Second Street in East Norwalk in 1981. In June 1982 they were married. Ed had landed a job at the design agency run by Tom Fowler, considered one of the top designers in the country. Seeing only a stack of drawings and ads, Tom was sufficiently impressed with Ed’s talent that he moved him out of the layout department and took him under his wing. This enabled Ed to earn a good living over the next few years, and more than made up for his being unable to continue with his art studies.

  On the surface, as they say, all was well. But Ed’s inner restlessness could not be assuaged by his fulfilling job and his marriage to the woman he loved. In fact, within about six months of marriage, Ed decided that he wanted to leave Donna. As Ed recalls, he “wanted what he wanted” and refused to see beyond that. He was actually involved with various strains of New Age spirituality at that time and the people he encountered on that path were encouraging him to “actualize” himself and “pursue his own journey,” come what may. So even his selfishness—at the cost of devastating Donna—seemed to him the true and most “spiritual” path. He sat her down on their bed and flatly told her that he was tired of her. Her tears seemed to have no effect on him at all.

  One night, not long after this talk, Ed had an extraordinary experience. Their apartment comprised the first floor of a three-family house. Ed had been using the second bedroom as his studio space and was working there one night, listening to David Bowie on the stereo. Donna was asleep in the other bedroom. Ed remembers that he was both proud of himself and grateful to be working on what was a fairly important project for General Foods, a major corporation.

  Then, suddenly, up in the corner of the room he saw an extraordinarily bright light. Ed says that as soon as he saw it the stereo music went dead quiet. Whether it was just his perception as he was enveloped by this overwhelming presence or whether the stereo actually turned off, he didn’t know, but suddenly there was only this powerful light and total, heavy silence. Ed recognized this presence as the same presence he had encountered as a fourth grader and then in his dorm room when he was eighteen, so it didn’t frighten him at all. He said that for a time he talked to this presence and whenever he stopped talking it would “breathe” on him. It was clearly some kind of interchange, and he felt total peace and comfort. He knew this was not connected to the New Age things he had been dabbling in. “This was the real deal,” he says. “I would talk to the light and the light would respond by breathing on me.” He said he knows it sounds corny, but that’s exactly what happened.

  At one point, Ed said, “Why are you here for me?” and suddenly the light vanished and the silence lifted and he heard the stereo again. But it had been so wonderful that Ed now completely panicked. “I freaked out,” he said. “I thought, You’ve got to be kidding!” He simply had to continue the conversation, but instead of turning the stereo down he ran out into the kitchen to escape its sound. He got a glass of water and stood facing the sink, trying to get his thoughts together. Then he turned around and the bright light was right there in front of him, not high up as it had been in his studio but down at about his eye level.

  Ed said that once again the light began breathing on him. He was thrilled and excited it was there again. But then, all of a sudden, as though someone blew out a candle, there was a final burst of breath and in that moment, Ed felt something hit his heart. In that moment the light vanished and Ed fell to the kitchen floor in a crumpled mess, sobbing and wondering what this all meant. “For the next year and a half,” he explained, “I was a madman.” For the first time in his life, he had a strong hatred of his sins: the way he was treating Donna and taking her for granted, the pot, and the porn. He suddenly knew these things were all wrong, but at the same time that he suddenly hated them, he felt that they were all pulling on him more powerfully than ever. He said that during this time, he felt that he was in the middle of a tug-of-war over his soul, as though he were being torn in two.

  He became so desperate to reconnect with what he had lost in the kitchen that he tried every and any spiritual path he could find. He was at one point about to experiment with “astral projection,” although somehow that fell through. But he remembers being desperate and half-crazed during this period. During this time, he and Donna decided to move up to the Waterbury area. Both of them had secured jobs there and found a place to live. So they ended their lease in Norwalk and packed their things. But then, in lightning succession, Ed’s new job fell through, Donna’s new job fell through, and the place they were about to move into fell through. They found themselves with all their belongings in a moving truck with nowhere to go and no jobs. So they ended up moving in with Ed’s parents. A good friend of Ed’s from high school, Tom Vaichus, let Ed and Donna store their things in his basement.

  This period was tremendously humbling for Ed and Donna, but their friendship with Tom and his wife, Susan, was a bright spot. Tom and Susan had become born-again Christians. Ed and Donna were clearly not on the same page, but Tom and Susan were kind, friendly, and emotionally healthy. Ed was devastated to find himself jobless and living with his wife in a small bedroom in his parents’ home, but Tom and Sue helped them deal with it. At one point Tom gave Ed some books he thought might help. Ed didn’t agree with all of it, but some of what he read pierced his heart and made the time a bit easier.

  One day, Tom and Susan told Ed and Donna about a weeklong series of Christian events that would be happening up in Springfield, Massachusetts, an hour and a half away. There were events every night from Monday through Thursday, and Friday and Saturday were all-day affairs. Ed and Donna loved Tom and Sue enough that they agreed to go and give it a chance. But as the week passed, Ed found himself getting increasingly angry. He came to the conclusion that what he was hearing was “Christian garbage” that was not only foolish but also extremely dangerous. By Thursday evening he was simply furious. On the drive back, he was practically yelling at Tom, and when they got out of the car in Waterbury he stood toe-to-toe with Tom, literally poking him in the chest and telling him that he would never, ever be dragged back to this thing. Ed told him point-blank, “It’s wrong. It’s dangerous. And I’m done. There is no way I would even think about going back.”

  As it happened, because of work, Tom and Sue couldn’t go up the next day. At least not until the evening. And for some reason Donna didn’t want to go up either. As for Ed, despite
his powerfully passionate protestations the night before—for no reason that he could fathom at the time or in the years since—he decided to get in the car and drive up by himself.

  During one of the sessions, the man on the stage began speaking about how a man ought to treat his wife. He was speaking on the verse in Ephesians where it says “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church.” The speaker was making it clear that husbands should not selfishly be looking to their wives to have their needs met. They should instead be giving themselves wholly to their wives in love and should be trying to meet their wives’ needs. Ed suddenly felt as though the man were pointing right at him, as though he was saying everything just for Ed’s benefit, as if every word were intended for him alone. He couldn’t believe how powerfully it affected him. He knew how he had been treating Donna was wrong and he was overwhelmed. Immediately after the session was over, they gave people in the audience an opportunity to stand, to say a prayer, and to give their lives to Jesus. Ed didn’t hesitate. He stood up and prayed along with the man on the stage, publicly giving his life to Jesus. What happened at that point he can never forget. He says that suddenly everything looked completely different to him. “It was as if shades had been over my eyes and now they were lifted, and I could see,” he says. “I wish I could explain it better. It was as when Dorothy steps out of her house in the Land of Oz and suddenly now everything is in color.” Ed says that he felt that all he could see was Jesus, although he didn’t see Jesus literally. But he knew when it happened that it was Jesus, that suddenly he could see Jesus, where before he had been blind to him.

  These events were held in the big sports coliseum in Springfield, and after this happened, Ed left his seat and walked around in the hallway, staggered by what he now saw and felt. He thinks that he must have looked like a zombie, staring at everyone in sheer awe and amazement at what he was seeing and experiencing. Immediately after this he said he felt a surge of love for Donna unlike anything he’d ever felt before, as though that day for the first time he knew what it was like to love his wife. This was Friday, July 27, 1984.

  That evening Donna did come up with Tom and Sue, and she saw the change in Ed, that he was no longer burning with anger but was instead taking copious notes of what he was hearing.

  From this period forward, Ed experienced an insatiable desire to read the Bible and for some time was reading it from five to seven hours a day. Donna wasn’t sure what had happened and feared the whole thing was just another phase for Ed, so she just kept watching and waiting to see when the phase would end. The good news is that she’s still waiting. They’ve now been married thirty-two years and have four grown daughters and a grandson.

  THE GOLDEN FISH

  What happened to me in the summer of 1988 changed my life forever. It’s the miracle that opened the door to so many other miracles in my life. It happened sometime around my twenty-fifth birthday, although I can’t remember the exact date. I had a dream in which God spoke to me in what I’ve called “the secret vocabulary of my heart.” But in order for that dream to make sense to anyone besides me, I’ll have to reveal that vocabulary.

  If someone had investigated my life at that time to determine the basics of who I was, they’d likely have settled on three main themes at the heart of my identity: first, being Greek; second, freshwater fishing; and third, the life of the mind and the search for meaning.

  My parents are European immigrants (my dad is from Greece, my mother from Germany) who came to New York in the mid-’50s, met in an English class in Manhattan, and married. I came into the world in 1963 at Astoria General Hospital and attended a Greek Orthodox parochial school through fourth grade. In 1972 we moved to the relatively rural environs of Danbury, Connecticut, where I went to public school and attended the Greek church every Sunday.

  For Greeks in America, being Greek is important, and perhaps because I am only half-Greek, it was especially important for my dad to communicate this to me. Once, when he saw a chrome fish on the back of a car he was excited to explain that this was from the Greek word “IXTHYS,” meaning “fish,” because the early Christians used this word as an acronym—Iesus Xristos Theos Ymon Sotir—Meaning Jesus Christ Son of God Our Savior. It was their secret symbol.

  My only real hobby besides watching TV was freshwater fishing. I fly-fished for trout and panfish, sometimes tying my own flies, but I mostly fished for bass—both large- and smallmouth. I was once even in a bass tournament. I had ice-fished too.

  At Yale I was exposed to what is sometimes called the life of the mind. I knew from freshman year that I wanted to be an English major, but not just because I loved words. I loved meaning too, or the idea that through the symbols and ideas in literature you were actually discovering the meaning of life itself.

  I never took seriously the idea that our lives are meaningless, but neither did I ever settle on any particular alternative. I had dismissed Christianity as hopelessly parochial. Yale was aggressively secular, and I came to think that if there were truth in the universe then perhaps the Christian faith touched upon it, but it had to be something much larger, something that probably included all religions.

  Sometime after graduation I came up with a kind of answer, involving the symbolic image of drilling through ice on the surface of a lake. It was a vaguely Jungian/Freudian idea that said the goal of life and all religions was to drill through this ice, which represented the conscious mind, in order to touch the water beneath, which represented Jung’s “Collective Unconscious,” a rather vague “God force” that somehow connected all of humanity. It was an Eastern and impersonal idea of God, making no particular claims on anyone, and how one was supposed to go about “drilling through the ice” was another story. I had no clue, but I liked the idea of it.

  Graduation itself was like stepping off the top of the ladder I’d been climbing my whole life. Good grades got me into and through Yale. I majored in English, edited the Yale humor magazine, worked in the dining hall, and sang in some musicals. At graduation I was Class Day speaker, preceding the main speaker—my future friend Dick Cavett—and I received several awards for my short fiction. What could lie ahead but success?

  But instead of success I was launched into a stepless void, unable to climb toward what I thought I’d wanted to achieve, which was success and acclaim as a fiction writer. For the next few years I tried—mostly in vain—to write short fiction, and I sold some literary humor pieces to the Atlantic. I spent aimless and unproductive months at the elite writers’ colonies of Yaddo and MacDowell. I lived in sublets in the Boston area and insecurely clung to a perpetually foundering relationship. One might say that I floated and drifted, which inescapably and inevitably leads to that singularly humiliating cul-de-sac of moving back in with one’s parents, which I did. I was twenty-four.

  The parents of my Yale friends saw that I was trying to “find myself,” but my own parents—who’d never had the privilege of a college experience and who had worked very hard to finance my own—preferred that I simply “find myself a job.” It was a seriously awful time. My now long-distance relationship was going down for the third time and I took the only job I could get: proofreading chemical manuals and other nonliterary arcana at Union Carbide’s world headquarters. My cubicle seemed to be about a quarter of a mile from the nearest window.

  But it was there, alone in the belly of this corporate whale, that I finally considered the question of God. In my misery I now befriended a bright graphic designer, who began to engage me on the issue of faith. Ed was older—already married with kids—and one of those born-again Christians I’d been trained to steer well clear of at Yale. I was perpetually wary, but in my pain and longing for relief I was desperate enough to keep the conversation going—for weeks and then months. To avoid real engagement or controversy, I half pretended to agree with him and his positions. But whenever he invited me to church, I demurred. One day at lunch, Ed said, “Perhaps you don’t really know G
od as well as you think, Eric.” I was offended. Who did he think he was and how could anyone claim to know God? Anyone with a brain knew that even if it were all true, we certainly couldn’t know it, and so would have to content ourselves with that, with agnosticism. It was the only logical choice. But I wasn’t content at all. Ed once told me to pray that God would reveal himself to me, but I thought praying to a God I wasn’t sure was there didn’t make any sense. And it didn’t. But in my confusion I sometimes did ask for some sort of sign.

  It was an unpleasant time in my life, generally. Driving through the miles of traffic on I-84 to Union Carbide every morning was real drudgery and added to my depression. I would listen to the local FM rock station and one of the songs in the Top 40 at that time was Robert Plant’s “Heaven Knows.” I remember in my desperate reveries about life I would sometimes wonder whether this song or that song might be a sign to me from God. It sounds ridiculous now, but at the time I was desperately hungry for something, for anything to reveal itself to me, to show me the way forward. One day I was listening to Robert Plant sing “Heaven Knows” and I remember wondering, Does Heaven know? Does God know? Does he know who I am and that I’m down here listening to this song and wanting him to speak to me? If he exists. The song had just come on as I pulled into the vast cement complex of Union Carbide, and as I drove through its long, depressing concrete tunnels toward the parking garage, I listened to the lyrics and continued to wonder. I pulled into my parking spot and waited for the song to finish, and the moment it finished, I turned it off. But I remember that then I thought: Okay, God, if you’re real, let that song be playing when I turn the radio back on. It’s embarrassing now that I would think that, that such a thing would have meaning to me, but I was grasping at straws. I really desperately wanted to know if “Heaven knew.” I had never been any kind of Led Zeppelin fan, but the song’s lyrics seemed to goad my thinking along these lines. I was desperate to know if God was listening to my thoughts and was real. But I needed a sign, so that’s what I prayed, if it can be called a prayer, and in retrospect, I think that it can, that any such thoughts directed to God, even speculative thoughts toward a God who might or might not be there, are prayers.