Proof The Bible Is True

Who held his hand after the devastating car accident? Most people who know me know I died on January 18, 1989, went to heaven, and was prayed back to earth about ninety minutes later; however, many don’t know the rest of the story—a part I didn’t know until more than a year afterward. One powerful element came out when I ate at a Chinese restaurant with Dick and Anita Onerecker. We had just come from church, where Dick served as the senior pastor. They had invited me to preach. My first encounter with Dick and Anita had been in the [More]

Little did they know that they were visited by an angel who bore a message from heaven. Sometimes, early in our marriage, for no reason at all, my husband would stop at a flower shop and buy me a dozen roses. “A whole dozen!” I’d say, overwhelmed and aghast. “Oh, Dave, they’re too expensive.We can’t afford this.” For a while he didn’t hear me. If he saw twelve roses, he’d buy them all. To the Italian romantic, more was better. But finally, my Scotch-Irish nature got through to him. “Oh, Dave, they’re so wonderful–but I just can’t appreciate more than [More]

Bang! The door slamming jolted me awake. The sky outside my bedroom window was pitch-black. It wasn’t anywhere near morning. Whatever time it was, my father was awake and furious. “Those no good…They’re gone!” he said. Then he yelled, “Everybody up!” I scrambled out of bed and followed my older sister, Geraldine, into the kitchen where my parents were. “The field hands have deserted us!” Dad said. “Snuck off in the middle of the night!” Why would they do that? I thought sleepily. Then I remembered. The afternoon before I’d been tucked up in the hayloft and heard Dad fight [More]

Click! I buckled my son, Gregory, into his car seat and hopped into the driver’s side. Gregory had a pediatrician appointment, and I was running behind schedule. I glanced at the dashboard clock. Please don’t let us be late. Cynthia with her son, GregoryI followed the speed limit, going not a mile over or under, and headed for the highway. Since the Eagle Ford shale oil boom, the roads near my west Texas town were busy. Highway 277 used to be wide-open for miles. Now it was packed with 18-wheelers. It got a little crowded on that tiny, two-lane Texas [More]

Any minute now, I was going to die. I gripped my blanket and peered out the hospital window, the cold December wind howling in the darkness. My heart thumped in my chest, fast and erratic. Not the strong, steady heartbeat of a normal 18-year-old. But I wasn’t normal. Three weeks earlier, I’d had a kidney transplant at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where I was still recovering. I had hydronephrosis, a disease that damages the kidneys. When I had one of them removed at the age of four, my doctor warned my parents I’d eventually need a transplant. We weren’t prepared [More]

Out in the yard trimming a tree, I thought, Fred should see me now. We’d been married almost 50 years when lung cancer took him from me. In the four months since, I wondered every day how I’d go on alone without him by my side. I threw some clippings into a pile and felt a presence behind me. A deer stood stock-still, staring at me from three yards away. I’d never seen such a noble-looking animal before. She was almost entirely white, except for a bit of brown on her forehead. But not just white. Immaculately white. Her coat [More]

“Who do you want to sign it, Georgie?” one of my friends asked that Friday as we stood in a circle in the schoolyard, holding our little autograph books for our friends and teachers to write in before eighth grade graduation. It was exciting figuring out who to approach next. “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” I said, flipping through the pages of my book. “Just so long as I get all my friends and favorite teachers.” The group nodded in agreement, but I wasn’t being totally honest. There was one of those who mattered most: Mrs. Lucky. She was my teacher [More]

From her perch atop El Panecillo hill, the 148-foot winged Virgin kept watch over the city of Quito. I lingered in her shadow long after my classmates had snapped their photos and left. When the coast was clear, I stuck a crumpled note into a crack at the base of the statue. I’d scribbled five simple words across it, my heart’s deepest desire: Please send me an angel. It was week two of my college study abroad semester in Quito, Ecuador, 6,000 miles from my home in Norway, and I was desperately homesick. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for travel. [More]

My job as community relations manager for a United Way after-school program involved providing information to parents’ groups, but while I was comfortable on the phone or speaking one-on-one, presenting to large crowds terrified me. I’d started attending weekly Toastmasters meetings, trying to get over my fears. My boss misunderstood and assumed I was a pro. She decided I should give a fundraising speech to a stage agency of 400 employees, hoping they would make a payroll-deduction pledge. I nervously composed my speech, incorporating attention-getting techniques and humor, just as I’d learned. I developed visual aids and compiled anecdotes. I [More]

Take your problems to the Lord. That had always been my policy. But as I pulled out of my driveway one morning, my biggest worry was…simply worrying. My concerns were nothing out of the ordinary: a big project at work, a to-do list of household repairs, trying to keep in touch with family. There was nothing I could do about any of it at the moment. I was on my way to work. And yet no matter how many times I told myself to stop, I couldn’t stop going over and over it all in my head. “Lord,” I said [More]

The bleeding had gone on for days, sometimes coming in a sudden gush. A complete evaluation revealed the cause. One that was rare so early on in a pregnancy. “You’ve had a severe partial abruption,” the doctor said. “The placenta has torn away from the uterus.” My husband, Mark, squeezed my hand. “You won’t carry this baby to term. I’m sorry.” As a registered nurse, one who had worked in OB-GYN, I knew there was no treatment that could stop the placenta from detaching completely, and there was no way to reattach my baby’s life support system in the womb. [More]

I know from personal experience that God’s messengers are ready to come to our aid in times of crisis. You will probably remember the disaster that happened in 1986 at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine). The zone of damaging radioactive contamination was still spreading when I traveled to Minsk, Belarus, to serve as a prophetic intercessor for a festival outreach for Jewish people. I had gone there with my two friends David Fitzpatrick and Richard Glickstein, with whom I had prayed a lot in New York City and other places in the United [More]

Indian summer in Montana—the perfect day to float down the Clark Fork River and catch a few trout. My buddy Mike, a Chicago native, had been bugging me to take him on a river float, so he and his sister-in-law, Lagora, met me by the Petty Creek Bridge, about 30 minutes north of Missoula. As we put my Hyde drift boat, loaded down with fishing rods and other equipment, into the water, I explained that I’d been on thousands of trips down the river, in the past as a professional guide and fisherman. “I’ve never gotten anyone wet,” I said. [More]

Evergreens had dropped so many needles on my lawn that I had my work cut out for me in cutting the grass. I turned off my hearing aid to block the noise of the riding mower, climbed on and started the engine. On my first pass over the yard a low-hanging branch knocked my sunglasses right off—and my hearing aid along with them! I stopped the mower and looked down at the ground. The sunglasses were easy to spot. But the hearing aid? A beige-colored device about the size of my fingertip? Forget it. I would never find that among [More]

“Just shows how important it is to listen to and do what the Holy Spirit prompts you.” Admin A big ol’ Texas-style Easter Mass? Count me in! St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral in Amarillo was an hour from Borger, our small town, but my husband, Mervin, and our son, Vinay, and I couldn’t wait to make our first trip there. Just as we were about to leave, a thought stopped me in my tracks: Take two angels. I had a stockpile of little fabric angels. Reminders that God was with me, always. But why would I bring some to a church [More]

A hard, angry pounding came at the front door. I crawled underneath the bed and nestled into the space between the floor and the mattress. I curled up into a ball, trying to make myself disappear. My mother had hidden herself in a kitchen cupboard. It was June 1945, and I was 17 years old—too young to fully understand what was happening around me in Berlin, the city I’d grown up in. The war had ended a month earlier. Mutti, my mother, told me that life would go back to normal soon. Papa would come home any day now. We’d [More]

“Ma’am, there is no seat for you on the plane,” the check-in clerk at the airport told me. “You must fly standby only.” “But, here, this is my ticket. I confirmed my seat three days ago.” The clerk only shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But there is no seat for you on this flight.” I grabbed my luggage and wandered away from the counter before I burst into tears. I was alone in the domestic airport terminal in Delhi, India. I didn’t have any friends in the city. I didn’t even speak the language. What was I going [More]

A man strode toward me across the dock in Charleston, South Carolina. I didn’t recognize him, but he sure seemed to know me. “Stuart!” he said, clapping a heavy hand on my shoulder. I only had a second to look at his face before another meaty paw clasped me to his breast in a rib-cracking hug. “It’s me, Fred. From Bequia. Don’t you remember? You saved my life!” Saved a life? That I would remember! The only saved life I knew of was my own. A life I almost lost as a hopelessly drunk sailor. Which made me think twice. [More]

Apprehension? Excitement? My wife, Rosland, and I didn’t know what we felt more while we packed our belongings into the rented U-Haul trailer. We’d married young, even for the freewheeling 1960s— and at 18 we’d already added a new baby to our family. I’d just completed my basic training at Fort Ord in California, which meant I could eventually expect a tour in Vietnam. Already I worried who would take care of my young family then. For now, though, I was in charge. We were leaving Southern California for my first duty station at Fort Riley, Kansas. We hitched the [More]

It was the end of harvest. Twenty-three-year-old Joanie had just come home from a job interview in town when her sister met her. “Dad needs you out in the field to help bail the rest of the hay,” Joanie’s sister told her. So Joanie hurried into the house to exchange her business clothes for jeans. When she met her dad, he had almost finished, but the wagon was full: 225 bails. “We decided to take the wagon back to the barn to unload,” Joanie says. “But as I drove the tractor, the bailer, and the full wagon of hay toward [More]

The last thing I wanted to see that night was some teenaged guy in a baseball cap. But there he was, standing by the exit door on the roof. I looked away, trying to give off a vibe: Do Not Disturb. What did he want anyway? Guys weren’t interested in fat girls like me. He wasn’t scary or anything. He just stood there, staring into space. I’d never seen him before. What was he doing on my roof? I often came to the top of the parking garage at night. It was quiet. I liked being alone up there, above [More]

“Blackberry cobbler! I can already taste it,” my brother Grady said as we made our way to the field in front of our house. We were on a mission to fill the new basket swinging on his arm to the brim with ripe, juicy blackberries. He’d admired it in town weeks ago, and so our oldest sister went out and bought it for him. The basket was his to keep, but on one condition: “You have to fill it with berries,” she said. “I’ll whip up one of those cobblers you’re always going on about.” I quickly agreed to help–anything [More]

He was sure he’d heard someone call his name as he navigated the swollen river, but there was no one around…or was there? Since sunup I’d been out on the Missouri River, riding around in my 14-foot metal boat. The river was running high and fast, swollen from heavy fall rains. Lots of debris floated past, mainly branches from the willow trees that grew along the shore. Every once in a while an entangled mess would come my way, and I’d have to maneuver around it. But I was used to the outdoors, and to adventure–small boats, single-engine planes, hiking [More]

On September 11, 2001, I was on the phone at my desk in 2 Chase Manhattan Plaza, a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. The second plane had hit. I was frantically trying to warn people in the downtown buildings I supervised. “We gotta get out of here,” my buddy Andre said. “The Towers are collapsing!” We made our way to the lobby, where blackness enveloped us. People were screaming. “Where do we go?” someone cried. “Here,” I called out, and Andre and I led a few others into the terrifying dark cloud of smoke and dust outside [More]

What was I thinking? On top of my night rotation as a nurse, I’d volunteered to manage First Lutheran Church’s Thursday night Share a Meal program. It was a worthy cause–we’d provide a balanced meal to more than 50 people. And I was just filling in for a friend this one week. But I was already overwhelmed by my work schedule, and didn’t completely trust myself not to mess up. “Don’t worry,” I’d told my friend. “You can count on me.” At least I hoped so. In the days that followed, my calendar became a balancing act. I hadn’t factored [More]

She had a vision of a little girl … and an angel. That vision soon became a reality. Was this a church? The high, vaulted ceilings made it seem like one–almost, but not exactly. That’s the way things often are in dreams, and I was dreaming now. Deeply. A woman entered the room. With her was a small child, a little girl in soft, lavender footie pajamas. She was barely a toddler, still a baby in many ways. Her brown hair was braided and her big, dark eyes were beautiful. But it wasn’t their beauty that struck me so much [More]

“After being hit by a car an angel takes a young boy to see Jesus who promises his healing.”  Admin On the Friday before school started, I was cleaning and equipping the bus I would drive that year. I had parked it near my mom’s town house, and while I scrubbed the seats and made the windows sparkle, Travis Daniel, my four-year-old, played inside at Mom’s. At least that’s where I thought he was until he startled me from the street: “Hi, Mommy!” “Danny, you’re supposed to be with Grandma.” He was all smiles at the foot of the steps [More]