Joan Wester Anderson - The Power of Miracles: True Stories of Gods Presence

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1998, 2005 Joan Wester Anderson
All rights reserved

Bible excerpts are from the New American Bible with Revised New Testament and Psalms. Copyright 1991, 1986, 1970 by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC. Used with permission. All rights reserved. No portion of the New American Bible may be reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.

Cover and interior design by Adam Moroschan
Cover photograph: Angel Gabriel, St. Pauls Cathedral, London, England Patrick Corrigan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anderson, Joan Wester.
The power of miracles : true stories of Gods presence / Joan Wester Anderson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8294-2213-9
ISBN-10: 0-8294-2213-7
1. Miracles. I. Title.
BT97.3.A53 2005
231.73dc22

2005010878

ePub ISBN: 978-0-8294-3055-4
12 13 14 15 EPUB 5 4 3 2 1

Im thankful, Lord, that all the darkness in the world has never put out Thy light.

U NKNOWN

I was about eight when I first became aware of what a miracle was. In this case it involved Jesus mother, Mary. Even though she had died a long time ago and presumably had gone to heaven, as all good people do, she also somehow had appeared to children about my age in a place across the ocean called Ftima, Portugal, to give them some messages. The apparitions had occurred in 1917, when our country was involved in the First World War (although we American Catholics did not hear about the sightings until many years later). Mary had told the children that everyone must pray for peace. If people did not, that current war would end only to have another, more serious one break out, and Russia would spread its errors throughout the world. The messages seemed incomprehensible to world leaders and were almost universally ignored. Just a few months after the apparitions ended, communism took hold in Russia, and the Second World War did turn out to be worse than the first.

Although the political significance was beyond my young grasp, I was fascinated by the idea that heaven and earth could intersect in this way, that Mary (or, as we called her, the Blessed Mother) could visit earth for a particular purpose.

As I grew, I heard of other visionssome involving Mary, others with her and Jesusoffering similar messages: God loves you. Ask for forgiveness. Amend your lives. Pray for peace. The Catholic Church is slow to investigate and accept such events as genuine (although Ftima was eventually authenticated), and news of amazing happenings in other Christian denominations were rare and usually over there, halfway around the world in some remote area, having little influence on my daily life. I decided eventually that miracles were spectacular, sun-spinning events, bestowed on rare occasions upon special saints so the rest of us would not forget our ultimate destiny: heaven.

In the mid-1980s, however, my thinking changed. Thats when our family received a miracle of its own.

Ive written about it before, how our son was rescued from freezing to death on the side of a road bythere could be no other explanationan angel disguised as a tow-truck driver, who then mysteriously disappeared. The event sent me on another quest about miracles, with new queries. If God would do this for us, just an ordinary family, would he do this, was he doing this, for others? Yes! It seemed to be a well-kept secret, but soon I found more than enough people from a wide variety of religious faiths with angel stories to contribute to a book. It was a book I titled Where Angels Walk that I doubted many people would read. Yet less than two years later, the popularity of angels had swept the country: talk shows featured them, stores carrying nothing but angel merchandise opened, and both Time and Newsweek devoted their Christmas covers to the subject. What was happeningwas it just a new trend? In part. But, as Time noted, if heaven is willing to sing to us, it is little to ask that we be willing to listen.

As angels remained popular, I noticed something else: an increase in the frequency and intensity of mystical occurrences being reported among ordinary people. Now that the floodgates had opened, people no longer hesitated to stand up at a conference or in a church audience and give testimony to a wonderful event in their lives. As a nation, we were becoming more comfortable relating earth to heaven. Miracles were no longer uncommon and limited to saintly figures. It seemed that many of us were touching a piece of Gods glory.

And accounts of miracles keep increasing. We find people bearing the stigmata (the wounds of Christ) in the United States and other countries. There are numerous reported visions of the mother of Jesus. Although her longest-running alleged appearance (daily since 1981) takes place in Medjugorje, Herzegovina, she is no longer limited to hillsides in predominantly Catholic areas but seems to be touching all cultures, appearing on a Coptic Orthodox church in Zeitoun, Egypt, and in Rwanda, Syria, and Korea. Since April 1987, on the first anniversary of the explosion in Chernobyl, as many as half a million people in Ukraine have claimed to see ongoing apparitions of her, accompanied by angels.

Nor are such messages limited to the mother of Christ. Protestant missionaries recount an amazing flow of Gods Spirit in places such as Australia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines. For example, a great miraculous outpouring of our time... erupted in 1971 at a Bible school in Nha Trang, South Vietnam, during the dark days of the Vietnam War, writes Paul Prather in Modern-Day Miracles. Spontaneously, students began to confess their sins and to minister to each other with a tremendous sense of joy. They decided to go out witnessing about their newly charged faith. Wherever they went, miracles shot out from the Nha Trang Biblical and Theological Institute into the countryside like Roman candles. Sensational healings and exorcisms became particularly common, but there were also reports of dead bodies that resurrected through prayer.

Spiritual signals are also happening within religions other than Christianity. In the mid-1990s, there were four lunar eclipses over Jerusalem, all coinciding with significant Jewish holy days; in 1994, the birth of an all-white buffalo in Janesville, Wisconsin, fulfilled a Native American prophecy that portends new spiritual knowledge. About that same time, reports came from India that statues of Ganesha, the Hindu deity with the head of an elephant, had started drinking milk from spoons. Word quickly spread via phone and CNN to temples in the United States and elsewhere, as Hindus of different castes and educational backgrounds flocked by the millions to their holy places with milk. The episode lasted for little more than a day in India, and about a week in other countries, as most Indian scientists debunked it. Yet it undoubtedly drew the Hindu worlds attention to spiritual matters, just as tears flowing from Greek Orthodox icons, the sun spinning at holy shrines, and other unexplainable happenings seem to do.