Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  And he said that he was awestruck, that he felt exactly as the shepherds in the field must have felt when they saw the angels in Bethlehem. He said he wasn’t exactly afraid but simply awestruck. It was a divine connection with the parallel world that was just awesome. He said he was just mesmerized as he saw it, and he felt incredibly grateful and worshipful, praising God as he took it in. He saw it for about twenty seconds, and then it was gone. Or, to be accurate, he couldn’t see it anymore. Whether it was actually gone is another story.

  That was the first time. The next time Peter saw an angel was also at Saint Thomas’s, this time on Easter Sunday, prompting one to wonder if these angels show up only on special days in the church calendar. (Perhaps angels are more high-church than we’ve been led to believe.) This time, Peter was again sitting on the aisle in the fourth or fifth row on the right side of the central church aisle, and it again happened during a hymn and again it was just as if the optometrist had flipped to another lens. Now? Or now? This time, however, the angel was not thirty feet away but right next to him, slightly behind him, just over his left shoulder. And by his estimation it had to be fifty feet tall. It was certainly much larger than the thirty-foot angel he had seen. He said that “it really startled and rocked” him when he saw it. In fact, he said that he looked at it and then had to look away because it was so huge and awesome and frightening. So this time he only saw it for an instant. It was different but still very similar to the other angel. He said the colors were different but similarly brilliant. It had an absolutely huge body and huge wings and he saw the same kind of multicolored armor that gave him the idea of needlepoint. Was it hundreds of gems? He could not be sure, because it disappeared so quickly.

  But that’s what he saw at these two services at Saint Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

  In early May 2014, just as I was completing this manuscript, I saw Peter at the New Canaan Society’s annual retreat in Washington, DC. When I told him I would be including his two angel stories in the book, he smiled broadly, as he does, and then told me that it had happened again, just a few weeks before. Peter was again at Saint Thomas’s on Fifth Avenue for the Great Vigil and First Eucharist of Easter, a service that begins in the last hour of Holy Saturday and extends past midnight into the first hour of Easter Sunday. Just a few minutes before midnight the church is darkened and then at midnight precisely the rector knocks loudly three times on the large closed doors of the church.

  The celebrant gives the blessing of the new fire and then prepares the paschal candle (which will be lit during the Easter season and at all funerals during the year) with a knife, incising an outline cross and the letters of the Greek alphabet—alpha and omega—as he says the words of preparation. He then lights the paschal candle saying, “May the light of Christ gloriously rising scatter the darkness of heart and mind.” At this point the doors are opened and the paschal candle enters, symbolizing the light of Christ entering the world. This candle is in turn used to light other candles in the congregation, which are used to light all of the remaining candles in the congregation, so that the whole sanctuary glows with the light of thousands of candles. Peter was in the third pew on the main aisle. When he heard the awaited knocking, he rose with everyone else and with everyone else turned in the darkness to face the great doors of the church. They were opened, and the paschal candle entered. Just then, Peter saw a “great warrior angel” by the front door, over the gallery organ. He said that its armor and color were tremendously clear and bright. “It was even clearer than 4K,” he said, “which is brighter than 1080p.” He said it filled him with awe to look at it: “It was ascending with the incense and the smoke from the new fire to the top of the nave.”

  Peter says that each time he saw the angels, he first felt tremendous exhilaration, followed by a great sense of awe. Something about the vividness of the colors especially made him feel privileged, because there was no question in his mind that he was seeing something outside this world.

  But those of us who have never seen angels must wonder why Peter saw them. First of all, we may conclude that they weren’t there just for Peter, because they didn’t communicate with him. Instead, we get the impression that they were simply there and that Peter was for some reason afforded the extraordinary privilege of seeing them. We hear stories of people who are allowed glimpses into the heavenly realm, who are allowed to see what is there, but what is invisible to the human eye, who are really seeing outside of time and space into the eternal realm. In the story of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration we have a picture of something exactly like that. Peter, James, and John see Jesus talking with Moses and Elijah. It’s as if they are afforded a glimpse through a porthole into eternity. Moses and Elijah had left our world centuries before, but they are still alive in Heaven and Jesus was able to converse with them. Peter, James, and John were allowed to be witnesses.

  Some people have a special gift of being able to see into this realm. I have had a few friends who have had the gift to be able to see into it very often, and I’ve had others, like Peter, who have seen into it now and again. In the course of our conversations about his angel sightings, Peter has also told me that he has twice in his life vividly seen Jesus as well. This happened at two churches in Connecticut, both of which are very different theologically and aesthetically from Saint Thomas’s Fifth Avenue. One of them is extremely different, about as “low-church” and aesthetically bare, with folding chairs and painted cinder blocks, as Saint Thomas’s is “high-church” and aesthetically sumptuous, with soaring Gothic arches and exquisite stained glass. So it does seem that some people are more inclined to be able to see such things. But we really cannot say. It is also possible that if we simply ask God to show us such things, he will.

  TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL

  My friend Eva Meyer was thirteen and a freshman at Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut. In the first few days of school (this was in the 1980s) she made some new friends and one of them invited her to a sleepover one Friday night in early September. Eva soon realized that these girls were rather different from the ones she had been used to spending time with. For one thing, they were all interested in the occult. In fact, they decided they wanted to have a séance that night. One of the girls was heavily into the music of the Doors and said she wanted to invoke the spirit of Jim Morrison. But Eva did not wish to “break on through to the other side.” She knew far too much about the dark side of the spirit realm to think this was a good way to spend the evening. She simply couldn’t go through with it and she said so to her new friends. So the girls decided that they would all take a walk to the beach instead. The girl whose house it was lived within walking distance of Compo Beach. The quickest route there was straight down Hillspoint Road and over Hillspoint Road Bridge, which crosses 1-95, the heavily trafficked interstate highway that runs from Maine to Florida.

  When the girls got to the bridge, Eva saw that there was a six-foot-tall stockade fence blocking the road. Evidently there was “roadwork” being done on the bridge, although they couldn’t see past the tall fence to see exactly what was being done. But the girl whose house they were staying at told them she climbed the fence all the time and just walked across the bridge. She insisted that she had done it many times and explained that they just didn’t want cars driving across it but it was absolutely fine to walk across it. Eva explains that for “some strange reason” they insisted that she go first. They would boost her up and help her get over the fence. To this day Eva cannot figure why she agreed to go first, but she did. She says that at the time she was “a five-foot-two, maybe one hundred forty pounds, somewhat chubby, very weak thirteen-year-old girl,” who had never done a single pull-up in her life. Maybe this is why she agreed to the three of them helping her over first, or why they suggested it. So the three girls boosted her up with their hands and essentially heaved her up and over the six-foot fence.

  It was in the next split second that Ev
a saw the trouble. To put it in her own words, precisely as she typed them to me: “THERE WAS NO BRIDGE THERE!!! NOTHING!!!” It was an unspeakable horror, the sort of thing about which one has recurring nightmares. Eva remembers in that briefest of moments seeing a huge semitruck roaring right beneath her flailing legs, which were kicking in midair, and she remembers the feel of the rough top of the stockade fence, which she desperately tried to grasp as her body went over. Instinctively, she screamed: “Jesus!!!”

  Then, just as she lost her grip and began to plummet to what she knew would be her death on the highway down below, with the endless speeding trucks and cars, she felt herself lifted up. She saw nothing, but in the blink of an eye she felt herself being scooped up in midair and carried back over the fence and placed onto solid ground—but a full ten feet away from where the three girls had tossed her over. She says that she remembers landing—“my arms were stretched out wide, as though a parachute had brought me to a soft landing.” And then she remembers the unhinged looks on the faces of the other three girls. She remembers that they were “utterly horrified, scared witless.” Eva says they were “white as sheets, with mouths agape, and eyes wide in terror.” All three of them shrieked and instantly bolted the scene, running away as fast as they could.

  Eva remembers the feeling of those moments. She felt strangely calm, but confused too. She knew without a doubt in that moment that Jesus had miraculously saved her life. She simply got up and walked home, not telling a soul what happened. But she remembers clearly that not one of those three girls ever spoke to her again. They wouldn’t even glance in her direction or come near her.

  Twentysomething years later, around the time of her high school reunion, Eva discovered that the girl whose house they had been staying in was a full-fledged Satanist. Eva saw that her Facebook page was filled with pentagrams and other dark, occult symbols. Needless to say, Eva “blocked” her.

  “YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DIE”

  Elisa Leberis is my chief of staff, overseeing everything in our company. She is a Stanford graduate, brilliant and omnicompetent, and has accomplished extraordinary things in her varied career. But this story concerns a time that was a rare low point in her life. In fact, it was her first real experience of failure. Up until then she had been one of those achievement-oriented kids who was used to receiving praise and support from her family and teachers and friends. She graduated at the top of her high school class of six hundred students, got into every college she applied to, and talked about her experience of God in her graduation speech. Even teachers who disagreed with her beliefs praised her for having convictions. She entered Stanford with almost a year’s worth of credits.

  But when it came time to plan the summer following her freshman year, she felt aimless. She hadn’t selected a major and didn’t know what she wanted to do with that summer. In the end she cobbled together two part-time jobs in the northern suburbs of Chicago, not too far from where she would be living during these months. One was a teaching internship, and the other was working in her actual high school, the place where she had experienced so much praise and support. Her assignment involved cleaning out lab closets and sorting through specimens, most of the time by herself in a nearly empty building. To make matters even worse, Elisa had somehow decided that biking to work every day would be fun. On the map it didn’t seem like such a long way, but after just a few days of biking through traffic in the high heat and humidity of a Midwest summer, Elisa knew she had made a terrible mistake and that there was nothing she could do about it. Every day as she made the long, dreary rides, Elisa spent much of the time wondering why she hadn’t found one good job downtown, near a train station. She was bewildered things hadn’t come together as they always had before, bewildered that, all at once, it seemed she had no idea what she was going to do with her life. She felt defeated.

  Elisa remembers biking down Church Street in Skokie on a particularly hot and humid day, when it happened. In her impatience to get home, she was pedaling hard in a low gear and going extremely fast, as fast as she could go on her sister’s yellow Schwinn Varsity ten-speed bike. She was approaching an intersection and in the oncoming traffic a truck was slowing down to make a left turn at that intersection. As she got closer to the intersection, she must have looked away for a moment, because when she looked ahead again, she realized that the truck had not stopped at all, but was already proceeding to turn. Elisa assumed the driver had seen her coming toward him, but she now realized to her horror that he obviously had not. He was steering the truck right across her path, and Elisa remembers that she was going so fast that before she could blink, the letters M-A-C-K on the front of the truck were right in front of her eyes.

  At some point in all of this the driver obviously saw her. She heard the truck’s brakes screeching loudly and a pedestrian shouting. Elisa says, “For a split second, it felt to me as if everything froze in space and time, and in that split second, I tried to figure out what to do but couldn’t see a way out.” She couldn’t turn left, since the truck was to her front left. To her front right, just past the truck, was a concrete island and a stoplight post. It was too late for her to brake—she was going much too fast and the truck was just too close. “I know it sounds ridiculous,” she says, “and I can’t really explain why I responded this way, but my conclusion was, ‘This is it for me. There’s nowhere to go.’ I don’t know if I thought I was going to collide with the truck, or die, or what—but I sat up and released my hold on the handlebars.”

  Then something abrupt and shocking happened, which she says is hard to describe exactly. She says the best way to put it is that she heard a voice, but not an audible voice. The voice was clear, and forceful, and emphatic, and it rebuked her, saying, “You are not going to give up that easily! You are not going to die!” As she heard these words, she felt as though an invisible pair of hands grabbed the handlebars, and on the first “not” the handlebars jerked to the right to get her out of the way of the truck. But she was then heading straight into the concrete island, and on the second “not” the handlebars jerked hard to the left, directing her through the thinnest of gaps, perhaps two or three feet wide, between the truck and the concrete island. She whizzed by the panic-stricken truck driver, and then she was out—the truck and the island and the pedestrian were all behind her and she was continuing down Church Street without having ever braked or made contact. It all had taken place in a moment. Elisa looked back at the stunned truck driver and waved, and said, “I’m all right! I’m all right!” And then she turned down the first side street she could find, and started shaking, and said again, “I’m all right! I’m all right!” And she thanked God that she was all right.

  “On the slow, shaky ride home, I didn’t think about how poor my choices had been that summer,” says Elisa. “I didn’t think about any of my choices at all. Instead, I pondered how, in just a few split seconds, God not only miraculously spared me from terrible injury or worse, but also communicated to a confused and discouraged nineteen-year-old the powerful, life-changing truth that her life matters to him.”

  CHANGSHA TRAIN STATION

  John Bechtel is something of a legend in the world of international missions, but he is an outsize figure in general, someone who, had he not gone into missions, might have made millions in the business world. He is supersmart, funny, accomplished, capable, and resourceful, though his portly body and bald head somehow belie these things; it is a dissonance he shrewdly and often exploits to great comic effect.

  I had the pleasure of meeting John five years ago at CAMP-of-the-WOODS, a Christian camp in the Adirondacks where he has been involved for nearly sixty years. His affiliation there began during college, when, working there as a summer lifeguard, he saved the life of a drowning man, and it has continued with his serving on the COTW board for more than forty years. Every year at CAMP-of-the-WOODS, John regales campers with his “missionary stories around the campfire.” John is a gifted storyteller, and each on
e I’ve had the joy of hearing has been extraordinary, but the one I recount here concerns a four-hundred-mile train ride through China in the early 1980s.

  By way of background, John was born in 1939 to veteran missionaries who served for fifty-one years in Hong Kong and China. As a toddler, he escaped with his mother on the last ship departing Hong Kong before the Japanese occupation of World War II. His father was interned by the Japanese in a concentration camp while John spent the war years with his mother in the United States, returning to Hong Kong at the age of seven. There he was educated in the British system at King George V School, where he was high school student body president and at eighteen represented Hong Kong on an international sports team.

  After college graduation in 1962, John was given a trip to Hong Kong, where the squalid and crowded conditions of the millions living there moved him to dedicate his life to working in missions. What he did over the next years includes creating a Hong Kong youth camp that has served hundreds of thousands of underprivileged youth, as well as spearheading a church planting project that eventually blossomed to more than 132 churches. John has built orphanages and has promoted missions in such places as New Zealand, Australia, England, Africa, Asia, the former Soviet Union and Europe as well as throughout the United States and Canada. In 1974, he was an official delegate to the Lausanne Conference. His many honors include four honorary doctorates.