Greetings All,
This week's "thought" comes to you from Eric Metaxas and is found in his lesser know book entitled, "Miracles - What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life." Metaxas graduated from Yale with a degree in English and is much better known for his lengthy and best-selling book, Bonhoeffer - Pastor, Martyr, Propet, Spy or his other more popular book Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce and his heroic campaign to end slavery in the British Empire.
In
this book, "Miracles,"
Mataxas deals only with those miracles cited in Scripture, or told to him by
friends and associates whose integrity he trusts implicitly, so as to avoid
sharing stories from people whose character and credibility he cannot
personally vouch for. (He even records for us the dream which he himself had,
that led him to write the book on Bonhoeffer.) The stories come from personal
friends who either witnessed or experienced phenomena that apart from a
miraculous explanation is otherwise inexplicable. Phenomena whose veracity he
might even have questioned if he did not personally know the various
individuals. For any interested in this topic of the miraculous, this book is
well worth the price. Most of the stories are too long to quote, so I share one
of the shorter ones. Enjoy.
"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 1980's) she made some new friends and one invited her to a sleepover one Friday night in early September. Eva soon realized 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 seance 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 (who had died July 3, 1971). 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 it was a good way to spend the evening. She simply could not go through with it and said so to her new friends.
This week's "thought" comes to you from Eric Metaxas and is found in his lesser know book entitled, "Miracles - What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life." Metaxas graduated from Yale with a degree in English and is much better known for his lengthy and best-selling book, Bonhoeffer - Pastor, Martyr, Propet, Spy or his other more popular book Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce and his heroic campaign to end slavery in the British Empire.
In
this book, "Miracles,"
Mataxas deals only with those miracles cited in Scripture, or told to him by
friends and associates whose integrity he trusts implicitly, so as to avoid
sharing stories from people whose character and credibility he cannot
personally vouch for. (He even records for us the dream which he himself had,
that led him to write the book on Bonhoeffer.) The stories come from personal
friends who either witnessed or experienced phenomena that apart from a
miraculous explanation is otherwise inexplicable. Phenomena whose veracity he
might even have questioned if he did not personally know the various
individuals. For any interested in this topic of the miraculous, this book is
well worth the price. Most of the stories are too long to quote, so I share one
of the shorter ones. Enjoy.
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 1980's) she made some new friends and one invited her to a sleepover one Friday night in early September. Eva soon realized 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 seance 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 (who had died July 3, 1971). 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 it was a good way to spend the evening. She simply could not go through with it and said so to her new friends.
So
the girls decided they would all take a walk to the beach instead. The girl
whose house the sleepover was at, lived within walking distance of Compo Beach.
The quickest route there was straight down Hillspoint Road and over the
Hillspoint Road Bridge, which crosses over I-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 wooden stockade fence blocking
the road. Evidently there was "roadwork" being done on the bridge,
although they could not see past the tall fence to see exactly what was being
done. But the girl whose house they 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 out 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 letting the three
of them help her up and over first, or why they suggested it. So the
three girls boosted her up with their hands and essentially heaved her over the
six-foot fence.
It
was in the next split second that Eva 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 reoccurring nightmares. Eva remembers in that
briefest of moments seeing a huge semi-truck 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 with her hand 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 below, with
the endless speeding trucks and cars, she felt herself being 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 on 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 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 three other 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 from the scene, running as fast
as they could.
She
remembers the feeling of those moments. She felt strangely calm, but confused
too. She knew without a doubt that in that moment Jesus had miraculously saved
her life. She simply walked home not telling a soul what happened, but
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. [Twenty-some-odd
years later, around the time of her high school reunion, Eva discovered through
Facebook that the girl whose house they had been at was a full-fledged Satanist
-- her page filled with pentagrams and other dark, occult symbols]."
If
you read the book you will find one other amazing story about Eva later in her
life. One which may explain why she was so miraculously spared.
Just
some food for thought!
In
the Service of Jesus, Pastor Jeff
