Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  Eight hours later, fatigued from another day in that crushing corporate atmosphere I dragged myself to the car, got in, fired the ignition, pulled on the seat belt, and shifted into reverse to pull out of the parking space. I clicked on the radio out of habit and the song that was playing was Robert Plant’s “Heaven Knows.” I had completely forgotten that eight hours earlier I had thought that thought, or prayed that prayer. It hadn’t crossed my mind once since I had left the car that morning. But now I was in the car and there it was. I remember being overwhelmed. Had God answered my prayer? Was there a God? Was he real? He was! He was real! Heaven did know. It was true! I remember driving out of that parking lot through the maze of concrete ramps and looking up and shouting as I drove, “You’re real! You’re really real!” I was beside myself.

  But here is the most amazing thing. After that, I did nothing. I’m sure I forgot all about it within a few days. It just evaporated. I didn’t tell Ed Tuttle about it. I did nothing, and it simply evaporated. Perhaps I thought the ball was now in God’s court or something, but within a few days I was as unsure of God’s existence as I had been before it happened. Maybe I was embarrassed at my enthusiasm and now thought that it was just a coincidence. After all, it was a Top 40 station and that song was near the top of the Top 40, even hitting number one at some point. Was it really a miracle? I guess I came to conclude that it wasn’t. But I will never forget that feeling that God was real, that he knew my thoughts, that I could talk to him. It only lasted for a short time, but it was amazing. What if it was actually true? But at that point I wasn’t at all convinced that it was.

  • • •

  A couple of months later—in June 1988—my uncle Takis, who is my father’s elder brother, had a stroke and went into a coma. Naturally my family and I were very upset. I mentioned the situation to Ed and a day or two later, he said that he and some friends were praying for my uncle. I was astounded at the kindness of the gesture. And I was also astounded at the thought of these people who clearly believed there was a God who heard prayers like theirs and could do something about it. The idea that they were praying to a God who was “out there,” who was not “us” or some form of “us,” but who was really “other,” hit me. This was different from trying to be in touch with our own “collective unconscious” or the “divinity within us.”

  A few days later, Ed asked if he could pray for my uncle with me. I was a bit taken aback, but because I so wanted my uncle to recover, I agreed and followed Ed into a ghastly fluorescent-lit conference room not far from where my cubicle was. I’d never done anything like this before, but I knew that it certainly couldn’t hurt. So we sat in chairs, side by side, and I closed my eyes as Ed prayed aloud—and as he did, something transcendent seemed to take place. It wasn’t anything physical or deeply mystical. But inside me there was a subtle shift as he prayed, as though a window had been opened onto another realm and I’d felt the faintest touch of some heavenly breeze. When it was over, I opened my eyes. What was that?

  Around this time a slight shift was taking place in my mind too. I had picked up M. Scott Peck’s book People of the Lie, and this prominent Harvard psychologist’s compelling accounts of dealing with real evil got my attention. He hadn’t himself believed in the existence of real evil, but over the course of a number of experiences, he felt that there was nothing else that could account for what he had seen and heard. Based on what I read in his book, I agreed. And I reasoned that if real evil existed, there must be an alternative. Would that be God? I was also reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, the classic account of a brilliant Columbia graduate who finds his way to faith and then enters a Trappist monastery and writes about it. And around this time I was reading Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship, which Ed had given to me, though I cannot remember if I was reading these before or after the dream. Ah yes, the dream.

  Some days after my twenty-fifth birthday, I had a vivid dream. I dreamt I was ice-fishing on Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Connecticut. Candlewood Lake is a man-made lake, created in the 1930s, to provide a backup source for the Housatonic River’s hydroelectric dam. I had spent a lot of time on Candlewood growing up, had swum there and had fished there from boats and from shore, and I had ice-fished there too.

  In the dream I was standing on the ice and I vaguely remember that my childhood friend John Tomanio and his father were with me. It was a spectacularly bright and beautiful winter day, so bright that you had to squint because of the whiteness of the snow and ice. I looked into the large hole we had cut into the ice and saw the snout of a fish poking out, which of course never happens. I reached down and picked the fish up by the gills and held it up. It was a large pickerel, perhaps even a pike. And in the dazzlingly bright sunlight shining through the bright blue sky and off the white snow and ice onto the bronze-colored fish it appeared positively golden. But then in the dream I realized that it didn’t merely look golden, it actually was golden. It was a living golden fish, as though I were in a fairy tale. And suddenly in the dream I understood that this golden fish was IXTHYS—Jesus Christ the Son of God Our Saviour—and I knew immediately that God had one-upped me in the language of my own symbol system. I had wanted to touch inert water, to touch the “Collective Unconscious,” but he had something more for me: He gave me his son, a living person, Jesus Christ. I realized in the dream that Jesus Christ was real and had come from the other side to me—to me—and now I was holding him there in the bright sunlight and I was flooded with joy at the thought of it. At long last my search was over. It was over. And it was true. There was a God and Jesus was God and he had shown that to me in a way that only I could understand, in a way that utterly blew my mind. God knew me infinitely better than I knew myself, and he had taken the trouble to speak to me in the most intimate language there was: the secret language of my own heart. That was that.

  When I went to work the next day I told Ed about the dream. He asked what I thought it meant, and I said to him what I never would have said before to anyone—I would have cringed to hear anyone else say it. I said that I had accepted Jesus. And when I spoke those words I was flooded with the same joy I had had inside the dream. And I’ve carried that joy with me for the last twenty-six years.

  • • •

  I’ve told the story of my dream of the golden fish innumerable times. I don’t tell it in public very often, but about a year ago I was speaking at Lee University and the campus chaplain thought that I should share my story of coming to faith. So instead of talking about Bonhoeffer or Wilberforce, I gave my testimony, as Christians sometimes put it. I remember that the connection with the students that day was extraordinary. There were about two thousand of them in the auditorium for that chapel and I cannot recall a crowd being more plugged in and responsive. I walked out of there on a cloud, so happy that my story had been received as it had.

  But early the next morning I woke up and opened my computer to find an e-mail from one of the students who was there that day. He had e-mailed me via my website earlier that morning. He said that he had been in the audience the day before and that, frankly, he hadn’t been impressed with my talk. He went on to say that he thought it was a bit pretentious or something. He also said that on the way out of the auditorium he had cracked a sarcastic joke with his friend, saying, “Yeah, maybe God will speak to me in a dream!” You can imagine that reading this was getting my attention. Why was someone who didn’t appreciate my talk e-mailing me and giving me all the details of how he didn’t appreciate my talk?

  But the next sentence explained everything. He said that that night, God really had spoken to him in a dream—and that’s why he was e-mailing me. I could hardly believe what I was reading, but I could tell from the way he said everything that he was on the level, so I e-mailed him immediately and asked him if he might tell me more. He e-mailed me back a few hours later and told me his story and the story of the dream. He said he was from England and was a freshman at Lee. He said
that he had lost his mother to suicide just three months before. He wasn’t any kind of Christian and had really only ended up going to this Christian university because of a sports scholarship. Then he told me the dream. One thing was clear when I read his account of it: It was God speaking, all right. It was an amazing dream. And he too had no doubt that it was God who was speaking to him. He explained some of the details and said that he clearly understood that God was telling him he needed to accept Jesus so that he could bring that peace and comfort to his stepfather and eleven-year-old stepbrother, who were obviously hurting badly from the loss of his mother, who had only been forty-one when she’d taken her life.

  I connected him with the campus pastor. Recently I was in touch with him and am happy to report he is thriving in his newfound faith. The idea that God would respond to someone’s sarcastic crack about a dream by visiting him in a dream that night and changing his life in the same way is something that will encourage me for a long time.

  “I AM YOUR LIFE”

  My friend Frederica Mathewes-Green is a great writer. I don’t merely mean great as in “totally awesome,” but in the sense that she is a writer’s writer, someone whose observational abilities, insights, and ability to turn well-crafted and compelling sentences are all superlative. Frederica is known mostly as someone who writes about her faith, so it’s all the more extraordinary for me to think that long before I met her or read her writing, she was not a person of faith. In fact, Frederica says that when she was in college in the early seventies, she was contemptuous of Christian faith and downright hostile to it.

  Frederica was raised in a nominally Christian home but rejected her parents’ faith in her early teens. She was not a materialist, however, and remained open to other avenues of spirituality. She says that while in her teens the essence of her “homemade belief system was ‘the life-force.’” She had concluded that it was somehow the “raw energy of life itself . . . [that] was the essence of God, and the various world religions were poetic attempts to express that truth.” She would simply take from each tradition what she liked and ignore what she disliked. But during her senior year in college she gained an insight into herself that startled her. “I realized that my selections were inevitably conditioned by my own tastes, prejudices, and blind spots,” she says. “I was patching together a Frankenstein God in my own image, and it would never be taller than five foot one. If I wanted to grow beyond my own meager wisdom, I would have to submit to a faith bigger than I was and accept its instruction.”

  This is when she chose Hinduism as the one faith whose tenets and conditions she would submit to. She was at the University of South Carolina at the time. “I chose it in part because I thought it would look really cool on me,” she says. “I enjoyed the vivid poetry and mythology of the faith, but can’t say I engaged it deeply. When all the world’s religions were coquetting to be my choice, Christianity didn’t even make the lineup. I considered it an infantile and inadequate religion. I found it embarrassing, childish—probably because I associated it with my own naive childhood. A rhetorician could have told me which logical fallacy this was, to presume that since I was immature when I was a preteen Christian, the faith itself was immature.”

  Not many years after graduation, Frederica met and married her husband, Gary, in a charmingly typical “hippie” wedding of the time, in the woods, with Frederica wearing flowers in her hair and sandals. “You can picture it,” she writes, “the women in tie-dyed dresses and floating batik scarves, the jovial black lab with a red bandanna around his neck, the vegetarian reception under the trees.”

  Immediately afterward, she and Gary took off for Europe. They’d saved enough money that they planned on extending their honeymoon three months. They would hitchhike, live on wine and cheese, and generally do whatever else they could to keep costs down. On June 20, 1974, Frederica and Gary took a ferry from Wales to the Irish coast and then hitchhiked up to Dublin. They found a cheap hotel and later that afternoon decided to take a walk and see some sights.

  They were in what seemed like a business district when they stumbled upon a church and decided to take a look inside. Frederica separated from Gary and admired the stained glass windows and stonework in the dimly lit building. “Eventually,” she says, “I came upon a small side altar. Above it there was a white marble statue of Jesus with his arms held low and open, and his heart exposed on his chest, twined with thorns and springing with flames.” Frederica explains that the statue depicted an apparition that a French nun had witnessed in 1675. The nun heard Jesus say, “Behold the heart which has so loved mankind.” Frederica will never be able to explain exactly what happened next. But suddenly this young woman so hostile to Christianity found herself on her knees in front of the statue. “I could hear an interior voice speaking to me,” she says. “Not with my ears—it was more like a radio inside suddenly clicked on. The voice was both intimate and authoritative, and it filled me.”

  It said, “I am your life. You think that your life is your name, your personality, your history. But that is not your life. I am your life.” It went on, naming that “life-force” notion I admired: “Beyond that, you think that your life is the fact that you are alive, that your breath goes in and out, that energy courses in your veins. But even that is not your life. I am your life. I am the foundation of everything else in your life.”

  After this, Frederica stood up feeling rather shaky. She says that it “was like sitting quietly in your living room and having the roof blown off. I didn’t have any doubt who the ‘I’ was that was speaking to me, and it wasn’t someone I was eager to get to know. If someone had asked me a half hour earlier, I would have said I was not sure the fellow had ever lived. Yet here he was, and though I didn’t know him it seemed he already knew me, from the deepest inside out. I kept quiet about this for a week, trying to figure it out. I didn’t even tell Gary, though he must have wondered why my eyebrows kept hovering up near my hairline.”

  Frederica says that it wasn’t the kind of “woo-woo spiritual experiences where everything goes misty and the next day you wonder if it really happened. It was shockingly real, as if I’d encountered a dimension of reality I’d never known existed before.” She explains that years after this experience she read C. S. Lewis’s gemlike novella, “The Great Divorce.” It begins, she explains, “with the charming idea that every day a bus crosses the great divide from Hell to Heaven. Anyone who wants can go, and anyone who wants can stay. The thing is, Heaven hurts. It’s too real. The visitors from Hell can’t walk on the grass, because the blades pierce their feet like knives. It takes time to grow real enough to endure Heaven, a process of unflinching self-discovery and repentance that few are willing to take. At the end of the day, most of the tourists get back on the bus to Hell.”

  She says that the experience that late afternoon in that dimly lit Dublin church was “real like that, like grass that pierces your feet. In that explosive moment I found that Jesus was realer than anything I’d ever encountered, the touchstone of reality. It left me with a great hunger for more, so that my whole life is leaning toward him, questing for him, striving to break down the walls inside that shelter me from his gaze.”

  A BROOKLYN DRUG DEALER FINDS GOD

  I first heard about “Cisco” through my friend Joel Tucciarone, fellow Yale man and longtime marketing consultant, who lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. For years Joel has attended a men’s Bible study meeting in the back of a diner and composed of Brooklyn “regulars,” including a number of ex-cons, some of whom were once involved in organized crime. For example, one of them, Mr. V, was part of what is known as “the Family” before he found God. After he came to faith, he went to the head of the Family and asked to be released from his line of business, which, uncharacteristically, the capo did, as Mr. V had taken the oath of familial loyalty. Cisco was a member of this Bible study as well and was known to be what is often called a “prayer warrior,” someone who spends hours in prayer and wh
ose prayers are known to have a particularly powerful effect.

  Whenever I was facing something particularly arduous, Joel would say that he’d call up Cisco and ask him to pray. A few times I even got on the phone with Joel and Cisco together, and I was able to hear Cisco pray his wonderful prayers, which were both respectful and like someone speaking to his best friend. Through Joel I eventually heard a little bit about Cisco’s story, and when I began writing this book I knew I may want to tell it, so one very cold late December night, I met Joel and Cisco in the back booth of an Italian restaurant in Bay Ridge. That’s where Cisco told me his story.

  Cisco—short for Francisco—Anglero was born in Puerto Rico in 1944. His family came to Brooklyn in 1949 and they were the first Puerto Ricans to live on Coney Island, which at that time was predominantly Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish. As a little boy in this very tough part of Brooklyn, Cisco’s dark skin and inability to speak English made him a target for the other kids. He told me that he would “catch a beating” almost every single time he left his house, which was more than once a day, to run errands or go to school. His father taught him a type of French foot-fighting called savate, but strictly forbade him from ever using it on the other kids in the neighborhood, so he simply took the beatings, more afraid of what his father might do if he fought back and badly hurt one of the other kids.