Tabla de contenidos para August - September 2018 en Mysterious Ways

My mom is making my sister’s wedding gown. From scratch. I like to think of myself as my family’s historian, so I’ve documented the process from start to finish. First, there was the competitive research stage (i.e., my sister tried on way-too-expensive dresses). Then the entire family took a field trip to a fabric store. Finally, my mom made a pattern and—voilà!—the dress was born. I’m not authorized to share a photo of it just yet, but it’s truly magnificent. Made all the more amazing because my mom has arthritis in her hands. How she stitched and sewed—and hand-beaded the lace—these past few months is a kind of miracle. Although, I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve always joked that my mom has “magic hands.” She once created a stylish ottoman out…

Melinda Neal I sat on the porch of my childhood home, the morning after my mother had passed. I am a person of faith, but Mom’s death was difficult. I prayed, Please, God, show me Mom is with you! I immediately saw a blue dragonfly hover over Mom’s favorite yellow rosebush. Was that it? My sign? I couldn’t be totally sure. Not until two years later. Mom was on my mind one afternoon. I fiddled around the house, needing a distraction. I came across a box on the top shelf of my closet, one I hadn’t unpacked since moving years earlier. It was full of odds and ends, including jewelry Mom had made for me. A yellow beaded bracelet at the bottom of the box caught my eye. Especially the…

My grandmother always had something creative up her sleeve for us kids. My parents would drop off my brother Mike and me at my grandparents’ house in Staten Island. Gram would lead us to the back porch. She’d take out chalk and draw a line down the patio table—one side for Mike, one for me. “Draw whatever you like,” she’d say. Mike sketched baseball diamonds. Me? I drew the same thing every time—a rainbow. Gram got such a kick out of my drawings. That’s how rainbows became our thing. We’d draw them together. We’d send each other rainbow greeting cards. She called me her rainbow girl. Even when Gram was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s later in life, she never forgot our rainbows. Gram passed in January 2017, at 88. I struggled…

In the Same Boat Just before Christmas 2016, Christine Cunningham walked the dunes of Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, while beachcombing for scallops and other treasures. Did she ever find something! A glass bottle in pristine condition—without a scratch or barnacle on it. She could see a rolled-up piece of paper inside. Christine’s husband, Aaron, managed to open the bottle. The letter it contained was dry and had the same typed message in three languages: “Dear finder, this message in a bottle set off in autumn 2011 on the occasion of the marriage between Christine and Nils in northern Germany on 19 August 2011.” Christine couldn’t believe it. Not only had the bottle traveled thousands of miles to British Columbia, but she shared the…

Every day I live in pain. Mostly it’s my left arm. The limb I almost lost in a freak accident two years ago. Now my brain erroneously senses sharp pain there at every moment. I’m numb in several fingers. I can’t grip things with my thumb. I used to be the big, strong, go-to, fix-it guy at the church where I’m an executive pastor. The guy who could lift his kids and swing them around without breaking a sweat. I’m not that guy anymore. And yet I give thanks for the accident that forever changed my life. I’ve come to believe that pain can be a blessing. That loss itself can be an opportunity. Not convinced? Well, let me tell you my story.… It happened on my daughter Cara’s sixth…

I glanced at my husband, Brian, next to me in the pew. I couldn’t believe he’d actually come with me! Every Sunday, I would ask, “Why don’t you come to church with me?” Every Sunday, he would say, “Sundays are for my music.” Brian was a DJ on the side. He had a recording studio in the garage, where he mixed tracks. For some reason, though, he’d said yes to church today. Already I was thinking this was probably just a one-off. The pastor appeared at the pulpit. “Good morn—” he said. His words fizzled out. The mic had died. A frazzled teenager appeared with another mic in hand—which didn’t work either. Of all the church services for Brian to see! “I bet the soundboard is overheating,” Brian said. “Maybe…

I have a story. One I’ve hardly told anyone, just a few close friends and family. It’s not the sort of thing you share with people. Unless you want them to think you’re crazy. It was 10 summers ago. I still remember the pungent smell of paprika in the air. The whoosh of gas as the grill caught and lit. The gentle breeze in the yard. Yes, the perfect sunny day for grilling beer-can chicken on our back deck. I stepped away from the grill, checking that the chicken was perfectly in place. The recipe required inserting a half-full can of beer inside the cavity of the marinated chicken, then sitting the bird on its can on the grill. Admittedly, the method was odd, but the results were worth it.…

My grandfather Jacques was a man of few words. A sharp dresser who always wore pressed khakis, a polo shirt and a gold chain. He’d sweep me into his arms, his Ralph Lauren Polo cologne so strong, it made my eyes tear. “Hello, my granddaughter,” he’d say, his deep voice overlaid with a vague European accent. As if he was from everywhere but nowhere in particular, which was kind of true. Grandpa was a Holocaust survivor. At 14, he was sent to the Blechhammer labor camp, near Kozle, Poland. He later survived a 200-mile Nazi death march and concentration camps Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald, where he shared Barrack 66 with Elie Wiesel. Following liberation by the U.S. Army, he went to an orphanage at the Rothschild Mansion in Versailles, France. Two…

Uncover more of nature’s wonders at Guideposts.org/NaturalWonders…

In the heart of Memphis, Tennessee, stands a phone booth powered by prayer. It’s called the Phone of the Spirit, the inspiration of designer Emily Harvey. In 2015, Emily lost her ex-boyfriend to a heroin overdose. Much had been left unsaid. Then Emily heard about a phone booth in Japan that allows the grieving to “call” deceased loved ones. Moved, Emily searched Craigslist and found an old booth with a baby pink telephone. Her church, St. John’s United Methodist, let her install the booth in its garden. The Phone of the Spirit doesn’t take money. There’s no dial tone. Instead, Emily says, “it’s a place for people to come and grieve or pray or meditate and just feel connected to loved ones again.” Tour sacred spots around the globe at…

Decatur, Georgia Laura Sissoko had long wanted to take home the stray she’d been feeding by her sawmill. A dog she’d nicknamed Buddy. “He finally let me pet him, and I decided when he was calm enough to let me bathe him and cut off his matted fur, I would take him in full time,” she told Fox 5 Atlanta. Before she could, though, Buddy disappeared. Unbeknownst to Laura, he’d been picked up by PAWS Atlanta, an animal shelter. Laura shed more than a few tears at her canine pal’s absence. Until a photo of him popped up on Instagram—an adoption announcement from PAWS Atlanta. Laura dropped everything and headed for the shelter. Amazingly, there was no adoption fee for Buddy. A few weeks earlier, a donor had covered the…

I stared at the clock on the ICU wall. It was 3 a.m. and I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t pray anymore. My two-year-old son, Joseph, lay on the hospital bed, hooked up to about a million machines. My husband, Brian, slept in an armchair by Joseph’s bed. Every beep of the machinery seemed to echo my deepest, darkest fears. Joseph might not make it.… A day ago, Joseph had been a happy, mellow toddler who loved playing with trucks and eating mac and cheese. Now doctors were preparing Brian and me for the worst. For the inevitable. All because of a freak accident in the snow. We’d spent that entire Saturday, January 24, 2015, sledding and building snowmen, only returning to our warm apartment when Joseph got…

Are some of us born with unique spiritual gifts? At 18, Charlie Goldsmith says, he discovered he could inexplicably ease the pain and ailments of people he barely knew, a realization that led him to become a healer. Now the 37-year-old Australian is starring in TLC’s The Healer. He works full time as an entrepreneur and doesn’t charge for healings. Instead, he wants to be studied by science to determine how healers—who have a long tradition in the faith community—can assist traditional medicine. He recently spoke to Mysterious Ways about his gift and what science has to say about it. How did your gift first make itself known? I was always a sensitive and intuitive kid. In 1999, I graduated high school and my father sent me to work at…

“Does anyone really think God has gotten weaker…? Maimonides put it beautifully: The only difference between a miracle and a natural event is that a natural event is a miracle that has the misfortune of being repeated on a regular basis. Natural miracles surround us every moment of our lives. The supernatural ones are more infrequent—God prefers for us to discover him rather than to impose his reality upon us—but be assured they are as eternal as the Almighty's love and compassion.”Benjamin Blech, RABBI AND AUTHOR OF IF GOD IS GOOD, WHY IS THE WORLD SO BAD? “[Miracles] are found at the great ganglions of history.… If your own life does not happen to be near one of these ganglions, how should you expect to see one? If we were…

The customer service counter at our Walmart. The last place I wanted to be. I was coming down with a cold. So after work, I made a quick stop for tissues and cough drops. On my way back to the car, I realized I’d lost my keys. I checked my purse, retraced my steps in the parking lot and at checkout. The keys were nowhere to be found. Gone. Worse yet, I’d lost the key to my husband’s Toyota a few weeks earlier. We’d checked everywhere—in the garage, under the couch, in all our coat pockets. My husband resorted to using his valet key. I knew eventually we’d have to get a new set of keys made. But duplicate fobs were pricey. And now that I’d lost mine? Double the…

“All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of a mystery that staggers our ability to sense it.”—ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL Philosopher and rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) was best known for his writings on ethics and mysticism. Born into a family of Hasidic rabbis in Warsaw, Poland, he was called to the spiritual life at a young age. In 1939, weeks before the Nazi invasion, Heschel fled to London and then New York City. His mother and sisters died in the Holocaust, a tragedy that greatly shaped Heschel’s theology. Most significantly his conviction that people can choose to live in a state of constant awe and gratitude, and act alongside God to create a better world. A belief that led Heschel to march alongside…