Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  In 1953, on his ninth birthday, Cisco’s father gave him a baseball glove, which was promptly stolen by two neighborhood bullies, sixteen and seventeen years old, respectively. When Cisco’s father found out, he seemed to have finally had enough, and he gave his son permission to defend himself. Actually, he went much beyond that. Knowing Cisco to be far outmatched by these older kids, his father handed Cisco a baseball bat, sent him out the door, and made it clear that he had better come back with his glove—or else. As an added impetus, he said that if Cisco didn’t return with the glove, he would turn the bat into splinters over Cisco’s back. Cisco doesn’t believe his father ever intended to carry through with that threat; he felt that it was one final encouragement to do what he needed to do to stand up to these older boys. So Cisco promptly went to the homes of each of these bullies, lured them outside, and unleashed the rage that had been building inside him for years, smashing each of them across the knees with the bat in brutal fashion, especially given his age. Needless to say, he brought the glove back and after word got out that he would defend himself, he was given a wide berth.

  Over the next few years, Cisco’s reputation as someone to be feared only grew. At age eleven he and a friend named Cookie began lifting weights, and pretty soon, Cisco became obsessed with it. He became tremendously strong and by his late teens was as big as some of the best bodybuilders in the world. At seventeen, he boasted nineteen-inch biceps, a fifty-inch chest, a thirty-two-inch waist—and he could bench five hundred pounds. By the time he was twenty-two, although he was only five eleven, he had a fifty-three-inch chest, twenty-one-inch arms, and weighed 245. He lifted at a gym frequented by Lou Ferrigno, and although he never competed in any formal bodybuilding contests, he once beat a renowned bodybuilder who became Mr. Universe, in an informal contest. Unsurprisingly, the hulking young man was hired as a bouncer at various Brooklyn clubs and was later hired to be a bodyguard to some of the organized crime leaders in the area. Eventually they used him to collect their debts. Finally, he was drawn in to dealing drugs. By any account, Cisco led a strange life. He had a regular day job, driving a refrigerated dairy truck—something he did for thirty-eight years—but at night he led another life entirely, in the world of organized crime.

  Cisco remembered that during all those years as a teenager, whenever he would return home from his late-night adventures, his mother would greet him in her familiar rocking chair, the one his father had made for her. Her father had been a Pentecostal pastor in Puerto Rico, and whenever his mother wasn’t cooking or cleaning she could be found in her chair, praying and reading the Bible. Cisco said that when he walked in, she would tenderly ask how he was feeling and tell him that she was praying for him to come home. She would then look up to the heavens and thank God for her son’s safety. Cisco shrugged it all off. He loved his mother, but this was not the sort of thing a tough guy on Coney Island was supposed to be interested in, and he wasn’t.

  Actually, Cisco had contempt for anything to do with the church. Much of the reason had to do with someone in the neighborhood who had become a pastor. Cisco remembered that this man had a church in the middle of Coney Island, but what Cisco knew of him didn’t comport with the image he had of how a pastor should conduct himself. Most Sundays, Cisco went to the house of his friend Tito to hang out and play dominoes. This pastor often showed up there with cocaine, and he tried to seduce the friends of Tito’s sisters, who were all of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen years old. Cisco knew that this pastor was in his midtwenties and had a wife and kids of his own. How could he live with himself?

  Because she had bad asthma problems, Cisco’s mother began spending a lot of time in the warm climate of Florida. Even there she had bad asthma attacks and went to the hospital, but after a few days she always recovered, and life went on. This happened so often that it became a predictable pattern. But one day in 1968, when Cisco was twenty-four, he learned that his mother had died. Cisco hadn’t been prepared for this. It came as a tremendous shock. His mother had only been fifty-two years old. The news hit him so hard that Cisco began crying uncontrollably. When he walked out on the street to go home, still sobbing, he suddenly saw the twentysomething pastor. That this hypocrite should be walking down the street alive, when the one person he loved most in the world was gone, tore at Cisco. He suddenly found himself cursing God over and over. “Why did you take my mother?” he screamed. “She used to go to church all the time. She worshiped you and praised you and you let her die! And this hypocrite pastor who’s always trying to molest kids, you gave him a church and he’s walking around like everything’s okay!”

  After that day, Cisco turned his back on God completely. He even became a hit man, killing for hire, although during our meeting that night in the Italian restaurant, he made it clear that he didn’t feel free to give me any details about that darkest part of his life. During these years, Cisco also became more and more involved in dealing drugs. At one point he was the drug lord over a significant neighborhood in Brooklyn. This went on until 1988, when he was arrested and sent to jail for two years. But no sooner was he released than he was arrested again. Eleven days after he had been released, Cisco was home, watching a Yankees game. Realizing he had nothing to drink in the house, he drove down to the liquor store on Brighton Beach Avenue and bought some beer. But as he exited the liquor store, he saw that two narcotics officers had blocked his car with their own cars.

  “What do you want?” he asked them. They told him they were going to search his car. Cisco was very careful never to have drugs with him. He might have been one of the biggest drug dealers in Brooklyn, but he wasn’t about to get caught with drugs in his car. So the officers didn’t find anything and Cisco was about to get in his car and leave, but just then a police sergeant pulled up in a van. The sergeant asked the officers what they had found. When they told him nothing, he told one of them to go to the back of the van, get a kilo bag of coke, put it under his police vest, and search Cisco’s car again. This was all said right in front of Cisco.

  So the officer went to the back of the van and returned to search Cisco’s car, this time producing a kilo bag of coke, which he held up so that all the bystanders could see it and be witnesses in court. Cisco knew there was nothing he could do. This was the rough justice of that time and place. In the cops’ eyes, they knew Cisco was a notorious drug dealer, so framing him to get him off the streets was perfectly acceptable. The cops took him to central booking, and that day he started what was a journey of six years in the New York State correctional system.

  After he was booked, they took Cisco to a main correctional facility in Brooklyn, which was located in the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. Cisco was taken upstairs to the fifth floor, where he saw a phone. He asked if he could call his wife, who of course had no idea why her husband had never returned home. But a group of prisoners quickly made it clear that he could not use the phone. Cisco was baffled. “Why?” he asked them. “Is it broke?”

  “No,” they said gruffly. “Nobody can’t use nothing unless we tell them.” Three of them got very close to Cisco in a threatening way. A bit later he spoke to some other prisoners, who informed him that that was the “house gang.” The cops had essentially given them the run of the place. While Cisco was sitting at the edge of his bed, quietly incensed that these men had prevented him from calling his wife, he noticed something. Next to each bed were small metal lockers. When Cisco accidentally leaned against one, he saw that it wasn’t attached to the floor. It was large and heavy enough for what he had in mind. That night when everyone was asleep, Cisco lifted one of the lockers and smashed it with all his considerable might over the sleeping head of first one and then another of the men who had threatened him.

  The third one woke up, but Cisco managed to smash the locker across his head as well. The fourth man, who was farther away, saw what was happening and ran screaming to the “bubble,” which was what they called the Plexiglassed area where the COs were stationed.
He shouted that he was about to be killed. In a moment all the lights came on and the COs appeared. As they tried to determine what had happened, the captain saw that there was blood on Cisco’s locker and asked Cisco if he had been the one to do all this. “Are you kidding?” Cisco said. “This is my first time here. Why don’t you wake them up and ask them who did it?”

  The five members of the house gang were taken away, four to the infirmary. When Cisco got up the next morning, he asked the remaining men whether he could use the phone and they quickly informed him that the phone was all his—that it “belonged to him now.” Whether because of the beating they had witnessed, or because word had gotten out that Cisco was connected to organized crime on the outside, or most likely because the five members of the house gang had vanished, things were now dramatically different. Cisco could use the phone as much as he liked. But he knew there were a lot of men there who had never been allowed to use the phone. So he asked them, “How many of you never get to talk to your families?” About ten hands shot up. “Come here,” Cisco told them. “Get on the phone and call your family.” He told them they could have as much time as they liked.

  Not long afterward, Cisco bumped into one of the captains of the organized crime family he had been working for who was doing time there. The man had been told to take care of Cisco, and he found him a job in the mess hall. Cisco had been working there for four or five months when two old friends from his neighborhood walked in. It was Hector, a Puerto Rican, and Frankie, an African-American. He hadn’t seen them in some time and they all greeted one another warmly. No sooner had they done so than the two of them asked Cisco if he wanted to go with them to church services upstairs. There were services every week in another part of the jail. Cisco thought they must be kidding. “Go where?” he said. He made it clear he was not interested. Then the three of them sat down and Cisco told them how he had come to be there, beginning with his mother’s death and his anger at God and the downward spiral into becoming a hardened drug dealer.

  Over the next weeks it became abundantly clear that Hector and Frankie had “found God” in prison. Every chance they got they asked Cisco if he wanted to join them at the church services and each time Cisco adamantly refused. “Forget about it,” he said. “This might be for you, but it’s not for me.” They continued to invite him. One day Cisco had had enough. He exploded. “No!” he said emphatically. “You ask me every week! Leave me alone! You’re driving me crazy!” At this point he went to turn on his Sony Walkman, to tune out his annoying friends. But for no particular reason it wouldn’t work. He then asked Hector, “Could I use your Walkman?” Hector gave his Walkman to Cisco, but for some reason it didn’t work either. Cisco would not be deterred. He asked Frankie if his Walkman was working. Frankie said yes, that he had put fresh batteries in that morning. So Frankie gave Cisco his Walkman, but when Cisco tried to turn it on, it refused to work as well. Cisco couldn’t figure out what was happening. He was frustrated and angry. It was mystifying. At about this time, Hector and Frankie left for the service, leaving Cisco alone on his bunk, surrounded by men listening to their own Walkmen or sleeping and snoring. He thought he would turn on the TV, but that wouldn’t work either. Now, he was furious. What in the world was he supposed to do with no music and no TV and a room full of snoring men? At this point, Cisco thought he might as well go to the service. Anything was better than listening to these snoring men. So he went up to the service and saw that the minister was none other than Dr. Matthews, his bronchial doctor. Like his mother, Cisco suffered from asthma, and Dr. Matthews had been treating him. But here she was playing the role of minister too. Hector and Frankie were thrilled to see that Cisco had come after all. “Do you feel it?” they asked him. Cisco said he felt absolutely nothing. What was he supposed to feel?

  Again, the next week they asked him whether he wanted to go with them. He didn’t. His Walkman was working now, so he turned it on and lay on his bunk. But five or so minutes after they had gone, Cisco began to feel tremendously agitated. He was normally calm and cool, but for some reason at that moment he felt extremely worked up and out of sorts, as though his heart might come out of his mouth. He began pacing up and down the room. For no reason he could make sense of, he felt compelled to go upstairs to the service.

  Since everyone had already gone up, Cisco went to the “bubble” to ask for permission. But the CO said it was too late. He said Cisco would just have to wait till Wednesday. But Cisco couldn’t wait. So he asked the CO to call up the captain. Cisco had done a fair amount of dirty work for this captain, who was himself connected to the organized crime family Cisco had worked for. Anytime someone crossed him or got out of line, the captain would send Cisco to their cell to give them a beating. For that, he got fifty dollars. “Tell him I want to go up to the service and you won’t bring me,” Cisco said, hoping the captain could get him permission. As it happened, he could.

  So Cisco went upstairs to the service. But as he looked into the room now, he had a strange feeling. Everyone was singing as they had been the previous week. It wasn’t his cup of tea, but it had been hard to get up here, so he finally went in and stood at the back since there were no chairs at all there.

  He was standing about thirty feet from the front where a group was leading worship music from a small low platform. That’s when he looked up and saw someone on the platform that he recognized—she looked just like his mother. She was part of the worship team.

  Cisco said to himself, “That’s my mother. . . .” Then he thought, “But my mother is dead.” At that moment, he started to cry and could not stop.

  Hector and Frankie came over to him and Hector asked, “Did God touch you? . . . You feeling something?” Cisco told him, “If you don’t want to get smacked in the face, just leave me alone. . . .” The two of them got the message and drifted off.

  When the worship music was over, there was a call to come forward to pray and receive Jesus. Cisco looked and saw his mother waving for him to come forward to the altar. She was smiling at him with the same smile that he had always loved. He went forward, his eyes still filling with tears. At the altar, Cisco got down on his knees and Dr. Matthews, who was ministering, came over to everyone gathered and prayed what she called the “sinner’s prayer.” Everyone repeated it, including Cisco. She finished and everyone stood up. When Cisco got up, he wondered to himself, “Where’s my mother?” and began to look around for her.

  Just then, an African-American woman, seeing Cisco rather obviously looking around, approached him. “Are you looking for someone?” she asked. Cisco said, “Yes, there was a woman I saw a few minutes ago who looked like my mother. She was waving for me to come forward from my seat and she was smiling at me. But I don’t see her now.” Then the black lady said, “That was me waving to you to come forward. It was me that was smiling and waving for you to come down and accept the Lord.”

  Now, Cisco’s mother was fair-skinned, but this woman was extremely dark-skinned, so dark that Cisco said her skin seemed to shine. His mother was only five feet tall and this woman was five foot six or seven. Cisco’s mother was a skinny woman, a little over one hundred pounds, while this woman was rather heavyset, and probably weighed more than one hundred and fifty pounds. While they both had black hair, this woman’s hair was quite kinky. Cisco’s mother’s hair was straight. And his mother had a gold tooth among her other teeth, but Cisco saw that this woman had no teeth at all. Cisco hardly knew what to think. He said to himself, “If that was not my mother, what did I see?”

  At this point, Cisco started to walk away, quite confused. But Dr. Matthews saw him and called him back.

  “Here, Francisco,” she said. She had obviously been waiting for this moment. She handed him a large brand-new Bible. Cisco opened it and looked at it. “It’s nice,” he said, and handed it back to her. But she said, “No, it’s for you. With this Bible you’re going to start your ministry.” Cisco had no idea what she was talking a
bout. What did she mean by “your ministry”? How would she know whether he would ever have a ministry, whatever that meant? Nonetheless, he took the Bible and left. Cisco still has that Bible, with the date it was given to him written inside it: September 25, 1990.

  After that day, Cisco went back every time there was a service. What happened to him in that service had changed him forever; it still affects him deeply. After retelling this story, he said, wiping tears from his eyes, “I was twenty-four when my mother died and I had not seen her since I was twenty-two. Looking back now at the age of seventy, you can see how I still feel about her. God did something to my eyes that day in the chapel. Because I loved my mother and because of the way I had cursed God, he gave me the vision of her, knowing that was the only way I would come to him. And he knew the purpose of my life, of what he had in store for me.”

  10

  HEALING MIRACLES

  I am the Lord that healeth thee.

  —EXODUS 26:15

  Then great multitudes came to Him, having with them the lame, blind, mute, maimed, and many others; and they laid them down at Jesus’ feet, and He healed them.

  —MATTHEW 15:30

  When people talk about miracles, they typically think of healing miracles. That’s probably because there’s something fairly tidy and binary about them. One day the tumor is there; the next it’s not. Someone prays for a blind man and he regains his sight. A televangelist prays for a woman struggling on crutches, she tosses the crutches away and leaps about. Whether such miracles happen is a separate question, but when someone mentions the word “miracle,” most of us think of these sorts of scenarios.