Miracles

by Eric Metaxas

  “How are you?” she asked Kimberly.

  “I’m doing okay,” she replied. “But—I know this is small and silly—but I lost my keys on Friday, and I can’t find them anywhere. They contain the university master keys, and it’s a big deal. Will you pray that I find them?”

  There are many people who, when you ask them to pray, say that they will and a moment later simply forget all about it. Others remember, and do pray. Then there are others who, when you ask them to pray, knowing they are likely to forget all about it, do it immediately. Kimberly’s nanny was one of these. She immediately grabbed Kimberly’s hands, right there in the driveway, and said, “Why don’t we pray now?” She then proceeded to take the problem to God in prayer, as she did all things, great and small. They said amen, Kimberly hugged her and then turned around to return to her car.

  That’s when she saw them. The nanny saw them at exactly the same time.

  They were gingerly—indeed precariously—situated in the middle of the outside of the car’s windshield. If Kimberly had been sitting in the driver’s seat, they would have been immediately in her line of vision. They sat on the sloped glass, so perfectly in the middle of the windshield that Kimberly simply reached out her hand and grabbed them off the glass from where she was standing.

  But what in the world had just happened?

  It was mind-bending. But there had to be some explanation. God doesn’t just make things appear out of thin air, does he? He made the universe simply appear, but that was an act of creation out of nothing. What was this? Where had the keys been before they were in the middle of the windshield? Had the keys perhaps been on the car’s roof for these three days, and now for some reason they had just slipped down onto the windshield? But if that were the case, why now? And why would they have perched in the middle of the windshield? Wouldn’t they have slid all the way down the windshield and been wedged into the slot where the windshield wiper arms nestle? Why were they right there, in the middle of the windshield, so absurdly prominent that it seemed like some sort of joke?

  All Kimberly and her nanny knew was that for three days the keys were nowhere to be seen and then they prayed and Kimberly turned around and there they were, within arm’s reach: the keys connected to the red heart keychain that she had made in high school shop class. They were right there, shining in the sun on an autumn morning. After Kimberly reached out and grabbed the keys she turned to look back at their nanny. Both of them had gaping mouths. It was an indescribable moment. They both knew that no matter how one sliced it, it seemed a miracle. And both of them had been there to witness it.

  “There are far bigger problems in the world,” Kimberly told me. “Yet in that moment, God showed up and cared for me. There is absolutely no explanation to how those keys could have appeared on the windshield. It was simply an example of God caring for me in that moment in an unexpected way.”

  TWO HEMISPHERES, THREE SONGS

  I first heard this story from my friend Larry Crabb at a New Canaan Society event in San Francisco. He is a well-known author and speaker with a PhD in clinical psychology and a veritable raft of professional credentials. The story is about his son, Ken, who fifteen years earlier had been through a very painful divorce.

  Ken met his wife in college. In Larry’s description, “She was a beauty queen and he was Mr. Popular. The marriage seemed made in Heaven. For about five years. Then it began to fall apart.” Whatever was wrong, though, Ken was strongly committed to making the marriage work. But his wife was adamantly opposed to trying. She refused to go with him to counseling, saying that her mind was made up and she simply wanted a divorce.

  Larry explained that at the time, Ken did all he could think of doing to keep his wife from going ahead with the divorce. He bought her gifts and at times simply begged her not to go through with it. But her behavior during this tumultuous and painful time indicated that in her own mind, things were already over and she was moving on.

  Things did not improve. In the end, in December of 1998, the divorce went through and Ken was simply beside himself with grief: heartbroken and shattered. One day at his parents’ home, he sat in front of the fireplace and wept, talking to his parents about his hopelessness and his feelings of anger at God, who had allowed this to take place. Ken believed that it was God’s will that we do all we can to keep our marriages intact, and he had done that, with all his might, but with no happy results. It simply made no sense, as though it were all a cruel joke. Where was God in any of this? His father responded to Ken’s outpouring by saying that what he was about to say wasn’t meant to sound like a religious bandage, but that he simply knew with everything that was in him that God would not allow anyone to go through anything painful and heartbreaking without desiring to ultimately use that for his larger purposes. Somehow there was a larger purpose and all we could do was submit our pain and suffering to him and ask him to use it as he wished to use it and know that he would.

  Of course Ken was not exactly in a place to hear these words or to act on them. His anger at God over this was very real. He wasn’t at a place emotionally where he could cheerfully assume God had a purpose. The way he felt, it seemed to him that God was nowhere to be found in any of it.

  Sometime during this terrible period Ken got hold of a gun. He loaded it and put it by his bed. One night, in a paroxysm of pain, sobbing, he took the loaded gun and stared into the wrong end of it, intending to end his awful suffering. He did this for about an hour before he finally decided not to follow through.

  Still, the pain continued. Every night for four or five months, when he went to bed, Ken told God that he didn’t want to be alive, that he wanted God to take his life. But he prayed that if he did wake up in the morning he would take it that God must have some plan. He had no idea what it was and he didn’t especially care, but he would try to believe that his existence would ultimately mean something more than it did at that terribly low point.

  A few months later he seemed to have passed beyond this suicidal period. But he was still very angry with God. Whatever relationship he had once had with God was long gone. There was a tremendous dryness at the heart of his soul. Whatever love and passion he had once had for God were mere memories. He knew that he was only going through the motions, trying to move forward dutifully, but really not feeling anything much at all. It felt empty and useless.

  That fall had been a particularly busy time at his job and Ken felt that he needed to get away from it all, for his mental and emotional health. He wanted to take a short sabbatical from his whole life, to get as far away from everything as possible. He wanted to recharge his batteries and, more important, to try and find God again. Ken loved to surf and had saved enough money to be able to travel to Bali, in Indonesia, so he decided he would go there for a ten-day sabbatical. One friend of his quipped that what Ken called a sabbatical was really just a well-to-do Christian’s term for taking a fancy vacation. To some extent that was true enough. In fact, Ken decided to stay at the exclusive Four Seasons Hotel on Jimbaran Bay, famous for its surfing. He knew this would take his mind off his difficulties, at least for a while. And it might even break the cycle of hopelessness, self-pity, and anger. That was his hope. And more than that, he hoped that during this time his feelings of anger toward God might change. He determined that during this ten-day period he would be very intentional about praying and reading the Bible. He might not feel like it, and probably wouldn’t, but he would do it anyway. He felt that he needed to. He couldn’t go on feeling the way he was feeling. Something had to change. Some days before leaving, he told his father, “If I don’t find God in a way that I don’t know him now, I’m not going to make it. . . .” He had really become desperate.

  Before he left, his father told him that he could count on one thing while he was away: His mother and father would pray in a focused way for him every single day for at least fifteen minutes. It would probably be more on some days, but he could coun
t on the fact that every day they would be praying hard for him for at least fifteen minutes.

  Ken lived near Cleveland, so flying to Bali was not an easy trip. In the best scenario, the trip from Cleveland to Bali takes twenty-four hours of flying, with two stops. But when he finally got there, he was determined to do what he had come to do. He would do a lot of surfing, and every day, no matter how he felt, he would spend some time reading the Bible and praying.

  During his first week, Ken found it very difficult. He continued to feel no desire to pray or to read the Bible, but out of a deep sense of duty, he did both every day. He found that praying was not quite as difficult as reading the Bible, because when he was praying he could at least express his anger to God. Reading the Bible was a huge effort. Nonetheless he did it dutifully. But mostly he spent his time surfing. The one book he brought with him to read during this time—besides the Bible—was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s classic devotional The Cost of Discipleship.

  On the seventh day of the ten-day trip, Ken decided that enough was enough. He would get serious with God, which in his case meant that on that day he would not surf. He has surfed a lot in the days previous, but today he would not surf a single wave. He would walk the sands of Uluwatu Beach and just pray. So, wearing his swim trunks and carrying nothing, he walked the beach, determined to somehow get serious with God.

  Sure enough, for the first time that day he felt a noticeable desire to communicate with God. But he wasn’t sure what to communicate exactly. As he walked, he found himself not praying but singing. For some reason that was his deepest desire during this time, to sing to God. After so many months of feeling nothing like this, it was a great turning point, and for two hours or so he walked the beach, communicating with God in a gloriously joyful way, singing his heart out.

  Meanwhile, back in Colorado, Ken’s dad, Larry, had been praying for him every day, just as he had promised his son he would do. His prayer was that God would somehow get through to his son and let him know that he really did have a plan for his life, a plan that involved more than just hanging in there and surviving. He prayed that his son would know that God would bring him through this period and that he would get past the anger he felt at God and rediscover his joy in knowing God and loving him.

  But Ken’s dad had to admit to himself that his prayers hadn’t always been as passionate as he would have liked them to be. One day in the middle of this ten-day period he found himself driving the ninety minutes from Denver to Colorado Springs for an afternoon business meeting. As he drove, he decided that he could spend the ninety minutes praying for his son—and so he would. But even now, his prayers weren’t the most intense ones he had ever prayed. In fact, he had the radio on and was praying as he listened to the music, now and again changing the station. At some point during the drive, he realized that the seriousness of his son’s situation merited more than these “token prayers,” as he later described them. So he turned off the radio and passionately asked God to help him find the one thing inside himself that he could pray with power and deep conviction. He asked himself, “What’s really inside of me and alive in me that I desperately want to pray, that I want to bring to God?”

  As he continued to drive and now got serious about what he wanted to pray, he suddenly found that he wanted to sing. It was a compulsion, really. And so he began to sing. Larry remembered that the first song he sang was the famous hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” Larry knew all the verses and as he sang them he began to weep. He wept because as he meditated on God’s faithfulness to him over the years, he now prayed desperately that his son, Ken, might sing this song and know God’s faithfulness too, might know in his bones that despite everything that had happened, despite all the pain, God was faithful and would always be faithful:

  Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father;

  There is no shadow of turning with Thee,

  Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not,

  As Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be.

  Great is Thy faithfulness!

  Great is Thy faithfulness!

  Morning by morning new mercies I see

  All I have needed Thy hand hath provided

  Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me!

  After he had sung that song he began to sing “I Love You, Lord,” a simpler song, written in 1980:

  I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice

  To worship you. O my soul rejoice!

  Take joy, My King, in what You hear.

  Let it be a sweet, sweet sound in Your ear.

  Larry continued to weep as he sang this second song and he continued to passionately pray that his son would be able to feel what this song communicated: an overwhelming love for the God who loved him.

  Finally Larry sang what he called the “Crabb Family Song.” Without a doubt it was this third song that corresponded most directly to what Larry was praying for him. It was the famous hymn “It Is Well with My Soul,” written by Horatio Spafford. Larry knew all four verses and as he sang them now his weeping turned to sobbing, so much so that he had to pull the car over. There, by the side of the road, he continued to sing the song over and over. The story behind this song is well-known to many who are familiar with it and is worth telling here.

  Horatio Spafford was a prominent nineteenth-century Chicago lawyer, passionate about the Abolitionist cause and close friends with D. L. Moody, the famous evangelist. Spafford and his wife, Anna, married in 1861 and experienced numerous tragedies together, the first of which was the death from pneumonia of their four-year-old son in 1870. The following year he was ruined financially when the Great Chicago Fire wiped out most of his significant real estate holdings. But these things would pale in comparison to what befell them in 1873.

  That year Spafford decided the family should take a vacation. They settled on a trip to England and planned to sail in November on the steamship Ville du Havre, but when business detained him at the last minute, Spafford sent his wife and their four daughters ahead, planning to join them as soon as possible. On November 22, in the middle of the night another ship struck their ship and the Ville du Havre sank in twelve minutes. Eighty-seven people survived the tragedy, but 226 did not. Among those who lost their lives were Spafford’s four girls, aged eleven, nine, five, and two. Spafford’s wife was found unconscious, floating on a wooden spar. Nine days later, she arrived in Cardiff, Wales, where she cabled her husband: “Saved alone. What shall I do?” Spafford immediately left Chicago to be with his wife. When his ship passed over the spot where his daughters had died, the captain summoned Spafford to his cabin, to tell him. As the story goes, it was shortly thereafter that he began composing the hymn for which he is now known. The first and most famous verse is:

  When peace like a river, attendeth my way,

  When sorrows like sea billows roll;

  Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,

  It is well, it is well, with my soul.

  And the chorus is:

  It is well! With my soul!

  It is well, it is well, with my soul!

  That this man would be able to think these thoughts, much less write a hymn proclaiming them, is almost unbelievable. It is simultaneously convicting and profoundly inspiring to think about it.

  This was the third and last song Larry sang that day, by the side of the road. He was there for thirty or forty minutes, singing and singing and praying and praying. He prayed that his son might be able to sing this song and feel what Spafford felt: that despite tremendous heartbreak, God was in control and he could still trust him.

  Finally, Larry pulled back on to the road and continuing to weep and pray he drove the rest of the way to his appointment in Colorado Springs. He would pray every day his son was away, but nothing would again approach what happened to him in the car that day.

  About two weeks after Ken returned from Bali to Cleveland, he flew
to Denver on business, and while there, his father took him to lunch. Not much time passed before he asked the question he’d been dying to ask: “How did your trip go in Bali?”

  Ken told his father everything, but of course the whole story culminated with the walk he took on his seventh day in Bali, when he decided to forgo surfing and just walk along the beach and pray. He told his father that for no particular reason he could discern he suddenly felt the connection to God that he had been looking for.

  “How so?” his father asked. Ken told him that as he was walking along the beach he had suddenly felt a real compulsion to sing, that his desire to connect with God had manifested itself in his singing as he walked along the beach.

  Larry suddenly looked at his son in an intense way. “Do you remember what day that was?” he asked. His son told him. It was the seventh day that he was in Bali.

  Larry did some calculations in his head and his eyes widened farther. How extraordinary! This had happened to both of them on the very same day. To Larry it seemed a miracle, but he didn’t volunteer anything at that point. “Do you remember what songs you sang?” he asked.

  As it happened, Ken did. He told his father that he sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

  “You did?” Larry said excitedly. “What else?”

  Kenny told him that there were two other songs he had sung. One was “I Love You, Lord.” The other was the Horatio Spafford hymn “It Is Well with My Soul.”

  Of course Larry could hardly believe his ears. In a moment he told his son about what he had experienced on that very same day and how he had experienced a compulsion to sing and had sung precisely those same three songs. Ken could hardly take in what his father was saying, but eventually the two of them had no choice but to recognize what had happened. On the very same day, nine thousand miles apart, they had both—unbeknownst to each other—been seeking to connect on a deeper level with God, and both of them had suddenly found themselves doing so by singing—and not just singing, but singing the very same three songs. Kenny then asked what time this had happened to his father and after a little calculation realized they had been singing it around the same time as well. Kenny was flabbergasted, as anyone would be. For seven days in Bali he didn’t have the courage to really think about anything. He just read and watched TV and surfed. But on that seventh day he walked the beach and for nearly three hours sang those three songs, the same songs his father was singing on the edge of a highway in Colorado, half a world away.