Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  Paul and Lisa had no real relationship with God up till that time, but they were not atheists. They had both been raised in devout Catholic homes, but as life progressed, they had slipped into being nominal “Christmas and Easter” Catholics. When their first child was born they felt some inchoate urge to do something “spiritual” and decided to go to a church in their neighborhood in London, where they were living at that time. They first tried a Catholic church but quickly became frustrated with their inability to understand the African priest. A few days after making the decision to try something else, Lisa was hailed in the street by a neighbor, a fellow expatriate and American, who introduced herself and that night left an invitation to a garden party being thrown by Saint Michael’s Church in Chester Square. Lisa went to the party and found that she liked the people, so that Sunday morning she and Paul went to the service. Lisa loved it, but Paul was so uncomfortable with it all that he never went back. The pastor at that time—and at the time of this writing—was a man named Charles Marnham. Unbeknownst to Lisa, he was no ordinary Anglican vicar. Charles and his wife, Tricia, had essentially invented the now wildly popular and successful “Alpha Program,” which has by now brought faith to literally millions around the globe. So at Saint Michael’s one found something far more powerful than the standard Church of England fare, and in a short time, Lisa was attending a women’s Bible study with the rector’s wife. She seemed on her way to a real faith.

  Before this seed was able to germinate, however, Paul’s job called them back to New York. Just before they departed, Tricia Marnham told Lisa that in order to make sure her fledgling faith didn’t dissipate, she should find a solid “Alpha” church in the United States and read the Bible daily, which Lisa said she would do. But by the time she and Paul found their home in Fairfield County and got properly settled, she had become distracted by other important things, not least the birth of their daughter, just two months after they returned. She found herself missing the excitement of what she had at Saint Michael’s just before they had left. She and Paul were now living on a tony street in a very tony town, and there was a traditional church right across the street. Paul saw this as an opportunity to return to a style of service with which he was comfortable, and Lisa went along with his desire because it meant the whole family could be together in church. Since it was so convenient, it somehow seemed just the ticket, and Lisa soon forgot Tricia Marnham’s advice and her own good intentions. So it was in this upscale suburban environment that their marriage continued to fall apart and Lisa’s faith began to slip away.

  During this period, Lisa spent more and more time at a local health club in an effort to medicate her unhappiness at home. It was there that she connected with a group of Fairfield County housewives who were either already divorced or wishing they were. As soon as they heard of Lisa’s growing unhappiness, they strongly encouraged Lisa to leave her out-of-touch husband for greener pastures. The constant drumbeat of this took its toll, until Lisa ceased caring about keeping her marriage together or trying to communicate with her husband about their troubles. So, unbeknownst to Paul, by October 2003, when she delivered her devastating answer to Paul’s question, it was all but over. Lisa hadn’t quite thought through the next steps, but for her things were now moving decidedly in the direction of ending their marriage.

  But something else was happening during this time too. The very week Paul and Lisa had their painful conversation, Lisa was volunteering at a book fair at their children’s prestigious private school and was manning the sales table with a woman named Deborah, whom Lisa had never met before. But for some reason Lisa opened up to Deborah about what was happening at home. Deborah was a woman of faith, so she told Lisa that she would be praying for a miracle in Lisa’s marriage, and she asked Lisa whether Paul would be interested in attending a Christian men’s group called the New Canaan Society, which a friend named Rocky had been attending. The day after Lisa met Deborah, she and Paul bumped into Deborah again, this time in the middle of a crowd of hundreds at the school’s homecoming football game. Deborah mentioned the New Canaan Society to Paul and even gave Paul the number of her friend Rocky. Paul was skeptical about attending a Christian men’s group, but he nonetheless looked it up online. The only thing he found was the eulogy that Jim Lane had delivered at the funeral of David Bloom,* who had been an NCS member. One line jumped off the screen at Paul: “. . . it’s about men supporting each other to be better husbands and fathers—men being better men.” Paul knew he needed that. So he called the number Deborah had given him and learned that we all met at 7:00 A.M. on Fridays at Jim Lane’s house in New Canaan, just fifteen minutes away from his own home. That Friday, Paul drove there, ostensibly to meet Rocky. He walked into a house filled with about two hundred men. Paul saw the four hundred or so shoes of those men on the front steps and learned that Jim’s wife had only two rules regarding Friday mornings: No food in the living room and no shoes in the house. Paul never found Rocky that day.

  The speaker that morning was Tim Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. Since my wife and I attended Redeemer at this time, I introduced Tim that morning. His message was titled “How to Pray,” and like all his messages it was as impressive as anything one was likely to hear. After Tim’s message, my friend B. J. Weber got up and invited new attendees to stay for a short introduction to NCS. In describing his own background, B.J. mentioned that he did marriage counseling. That was all Paul needed to hear. He grabbed B.J. and scheduled an appointment for the following week. Amazingly, for the next several months, B.J. met with Paul and Lisa every single Friday, right after the NCS meetings.

  As is often the case with this type of counseling, progress is hard to measure. Lisa brought a boatload of anger to these sessions, but she didn’t communicate this very much and somehow it was never really dealt with. On the surface it seemed they were making progress. In January of 2004 they all agreed that the marriage was over the proverbial hump and even hosted a dinner at their home to thank those who had helped them along the way, including Deborah, Rocky, and B.J. Soon thereafter, B.J. asked Paul to get up in front of the hundreds of men at the annual NCS retreat at the Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York to tell the happy story of how NCS had saved his marriage.

  But he had spoken too soon, because despite these outward appearances, Lisa’s anger and resentment had continued. In the next weeks, they somehow got the better of her and undid any apparent progress they had made. So in April of 2004, after all that had transpired, she delivered a staggering bombshell. She told Paul she wanted a divorce. The news was, of course, unexpected and devastating. But Paul was prepared for it in a way he had not been the previous October. His faith had been growing steadily all these months, even if Lisa’s had not. Five months earlier, on December 5, he had officially made a decision to hand control of his life over to Jesus and prayed to accept Jesus as Lord. So he now understood that he had a tremendous battle ahead, but he also knew that he had weapons with which to wage that battle, along with the faith and the will necessary. Paul also believed that deep down Lisa wanted their marriage to work but thought it an impossibility. Because she believed she had tried everything over the years to repair their relationship, Lisa saw only two choices: to remain in a hopelessly and desperately unhappy marriage, or to get out. Paul saw a third path: a restored and happy marriage. But he knew that it required nothing less than God’s intervention.

  Through NCS speakers like Tim Keller, Dudley Hall, and Jack Deere, Paul had learned about the verse in the Old Testament Book of Malachi where God declares that he “hates” divorce. He also learned that God would “never leave him nor forsake him,” loved him “unconditionally,” and would never give him more than he could handle, and that “nothing is impossible with God.” Paul also believed that God’s will was for his marriage to be saved, and he was determined to do everything in his power to stand for his marriage and to trust God to do the rest. He vowed to never take
off his wedding ring and never stop telling Lisa that he loved her. Paul also vowed not to move out of their home, despite Lisa’s strong requests that he do so. The first person Paul went to after October 5 was one of his law partners who had become something of a father figure to him. Paul knew the man had been divorced many years before. The man said that his wife had asked him to move out and he always regretted that he had done so, because it had made the process too easy. His one piece of advice to Paul was to stay at home. Though the man was not a Christian, Paul was sure God had sent him and others to guide Paul on his journey through this trial.

  Paul had been developing close friendships at NCS—something he came to realize had been absent in his life. So the first thing Paul did was tell the news to some of these close friends. Although NCS typically took a break during the summer, this year Jim Lane had decided to organize the men into small groups that would meet weekly over the summer to talk and pray. This was the goal of NCS, to connect men with other men in friendships, and NCS itself was now far too large for that. Paul joined one of these first NCS “Energy” groups and shared his story. When he did so, one man in the group, named Preben, who was a big proponent of the idea that we are to take “God’s promises” in the Bible seriously, said that because God was for marriage and “hated” divorce, we could stand with God against divorce. He would be with us as we did so. So the small group agreed to stand with Paul in prayer and stand on God’s promise. All they had to do was believe and pray. Paul’s small group continued to meet every Friday, to share their stories and troubles and to pray. So during their time together and in their private prayer times throughout those weeks, the group stood with Paul in faith against divorce.

  Practically speaking, Paul had decided that one way he would live out his faith in that Scripture was by doing nothing to cooperate with the divorce Lisa wanted. He didn’t fight her, but neither would he lift a finger to help it along. But in July Lisa filed for divorce and a state marshal came to their door to deliver the papers. As it happened, Paul and Lisa’s five-year-old son answered the door that day, so it was from his son’s hands that Paul received the divorce papers. He had no choice but to go along, but again, he would do all he could to work against it. Most important, in his eyes, was his and the group’s continued prayers against it.*

  Being able to “have faith” that what God says is true can sometimes be difficult, especially when circumstances and emotions work against what it says. In Paul’s case, the outward reality of the divorce was overwhelming, but because of the encouragement of his friends in his small group he was able to stand firm in his mind against what was happening. In fact, it was in the small group that the seeds of the miracle that took place on Friday the thirteenth, August 2004 were planted.

  On the morning of August 13, just two days after Paul’s forty-third birthday, Preben, who had introduced Paul to the concept of “standing on God’s promises,” took the idea a bit further. Many Christians believe God will sometimes highlight a particular passage of Scripture for someone as he is praying or reading the Bible, such that it has a particular and personal application. That day, Preben told Paul that he felt in his own prayer time that God had highlighted something in Jeremiah 24 as a particular verse for Paul. People often enough get wild notions that in fact have nothing at all to do with God. So one must always be careful about taking someone else’s word for such things. This is why Preben told Paul that when he got home that day, after the small group, Paul should himself pray over that Scripture, to see if he too felt that it was meant for him, from God. But Preben said that if he did feel that, the following week the group would “agree” with God on it and “stand on it,” knowing that if this was indeed what God had spoken concerning Paul’s situation, it couldn’t fail—if only he believed it and “stood on that belief.”

  The verses in Jeremiah 24 that Preben strongly felt God meant for Paul and his situation referred to the exiled Israelites, whom God would restore to their land:

  I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart.

  Preben was saying to Paul that he felt that in his prayer time over this issue, God had told him that these verses were God’s promise to Paul that he, God, would redeem the situation, would restore Paul’s marriage, and would return Lisa to her relationship with God and to her marriage with Paul. So Paul should ask God if these verses really were for him and if he felt they were he must take this promise from God as a promise directly to him and must believe it and “stand on it.”

  Most serious Christians—much less nominal Christians or non-Christians—would think all of this a bit strange. But then Preben said something else that was stranger still. He asked Paul whether he’d ever invited Jesus into his home. Paul wasn’t sure what Preben was saying. Did he mean this generally, or somehow more literally? Preben meant it literally. He told Paul that after he got home he should go to his front door and pray that Jesus come into his home and then open the door so that Jesus could in fact come in. Paul certainly thought this strange, but when one is desperate one often finds that one’s faith is stronger than one’s doubts and one can believe things one would scoff at when things are fine. Besides, what harm could there be in it? Even if it was nothing more than a symbolic gesture, it was a nice idea.

  So after the men’s group ended, Paul drove back to his capacious house. His children, five and three, were with their nanny* in the home, and Paul immediately went to his first-floor office to read the verses in Jeremiah that Preben had indicated. He found Jeremiah 24 and in praying about it he did indeed feel that this was God’s promise to him, for Lisa and for their marriage. He decided then and there that he would remember this promise in his prayers, and he would remind God that he was in agreement with this—that he was believing God would indeed restore his marriage and Lisa’s faith.

  After he was finished praying in his office at about nine thirty that morning, Paul suddenly realized he had forgotten about the second thing Preben had said, about inviting Jesus into his home. He hadn’t attached any special importance to it, but wanting to dot every i and cross every t, he walked to the side door of the house, which they used more often than the front door, and he stood in front of it. But when he now closed his eyes to pray, something truly strange happened. Paul told me that with his eyes closed, he could somehow “see”—and what he saw was a bright white figure standing on the other side of the closed door.

  He said he couldn’t make out features, but it was an extremely bright white figure whom he immediately believed to be Jesus, and it startled him, as it would anyone. So he opened his eyes. But with his eyes open he saw only the closed door. Then he shut his eyes again to pray and again immediately “saw” the white figure on the other side of the door. Paul knew he wasn’t imagining this, and he knew it was a miracle. So with his eyes closed, and continuing to pray, he opened the door and “watched” the figure walk into his home. What happened next is hard to fathom, but Paul said that with his eyes closed, he walked with this white figure into every room in the house, seeing everything. He kept his eyes closed and simply followed. Paul watched as Jesus lifted his hands and prayed over every room. They walked upstairs—Paul’s eyes were still closed—and did this in every room there as well. Then they went downstairs again, and the last room they entered was Paul’s office. After Jesus had prayed over the office, Paul knew they were done, and he finally opened his eyes. He was alone. Paul assumed that since they had now prayed over every room, their mission was evidently accomplished. So he sat down at his desk, trying to fathom what had just happened. It was not easy to do. And so Paul closed his eyes to pray once more. In the very moment that he closed his eyes he again saw the figure standing in the middle of the room, and this time, his presence was different. It was overwhelming—so much that Paul got off his chair and fell to the floor, weeping, and embracing Jesus’s ankles, undone with gr
atitude and joy and surrender.*

  Paul never had anything like that happen again. But it encouraged him in his faith dramatically, as one would expect. From that moment forward he persisted more than ever in praying for his marriage and in expecting God to heal and restore it.

  Paul found that after this amazing experience, God would routinely encourage him through others and through things he read. One day in the Friday prayer group a man named David Wagner showed up. David is known for being gifted in what some Christians call the “Prophetic,” which means that he often hears things from God when he prays for people. David brought another friend, Len Ballinger, who had similar spiritual gifts. Len prayed and said that when he prayed over Paul a passage from the Book of Hosea kept coming to his mind. The verses he mentioned were Hosea 2:6–7.

  Therefore I will block her path with thorn bushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way. She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, “I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now.”

  Len said that Paul should pray this prayer when he was praying for his wife and their situation. Over the next weeks, Paul did this faithfully, and continued to pray and “agree with” and “stand on” the verses from Jeremiah too. When praying, he actually pictured in his mind a hedge of thorns growing up around her to protect her from anything that would harm their marriage or family. He imagined it growing so tall and thick that she could only look up toward God.