Indholdsfortegnelse for April - May 2016 i Mysterious Ways

What do the following items have in common? A marble bathtub. A Gilligan hat. A musical toy pig. A hippie ring. A damaged coffee table. On the surface, nothing. They seem like random inanimate objects, none particularly remarkable. And yet, in this issue of Mysterious Ways, you’ll learn otherwise. I’m a sentimental soul, and if you’re anything like me, you hold onto things that have long outlived their usefulness. The conference name tags and old press credentials cluttering my desk form a montage of my career milestones. An electronic talking clock on my dresser—one of the few possessions that my decidedly unsentimental grandparents kept when they moved to a retirement condo—helps my mind time-travel back to their old house and all the things in it I loved. My dresser drawers…

Melanie Salava I had begun losing my hair from chemotherapy treatments. I vowed to keep a positive attitude—after all, my hair seemed a trivial thing to mourn when I was fighting Stage 3 breast cancer. After a while, I asked a stylist to shave my head, instead of letting it fall out in patches. This gave me a modicum of control over my situation. I tried to make light of it—I even sent my friends a cartoon depicting two bald eagles. One eagle was wearing a hairpiece and the other eagle said, “You always were an overachiever!” But truthfully, I missed my hair. One day I was in the kitchen and I happened to look out the window. I gasped—I was face-to-face with a bald eagle! It saw me and…

Daylight was just spreading across the horizon. My best friend, Jennifer, and I stood on the beach, gazing out at the ocean. It was our last day on Maui—we had a plane to catch in a few hours. But I was glad we’d gotten up early for one last breathtaking view, a visit to a mysterious spot I’d heard about from our hotel’s cultural advisor, Clifford, the night before. A place called Makalua-puna Point. “I don’t want to leave,” Jennifer said. I didn’t either. Hawaii felt like heaven. Even more than I’d imagined it would when Maui’s tourism board invited me to visit and write about my experiences. It was the best assignment a freelance travel writer could ask for, a business trip that didn’t feel like business. Jennifer was…

Sutton Coldfield, England Little did Claire Beams know that the stranger snoozing next to her on the train would change—and possibly save—her life. Claire’s stop was the last one on the line, but when the train pulled into the station her slumbering seatmate didn’t stir. “I had to wake him to get him off the train,” Claire told the U.K.’s Daily Express. Stranger things have led to love, and soon Paul Jones and Claire were a couple. He was there for Claire as she managed the debilitating effects of a congenital condition called biliary atresia, which can lead to liver failure. Claire was frequently hospitalized to treat infections and had trouble walking. Doctors said a partial liver transplant was her only hope but were dismayed when tests found that no…

Our aging dog, Mooky, struggled to walk and couldn’t keep down his food. We knew he was suffering. “Nothing can be done,” the vet said. After 16 wonderful years with Mooky, my husband and I let him go. That night, I had a dream: Mooky, not much older than a puppy, stood wagging his tail in our living room. He held something in his mouth—a single white flower. Queen Anne’s lace, a plant that grows wild. That was odd. Mooky never tore up my garden, and besides, Queen Anne’s lace didn’t grow there. He laid the blossom at my feet. “Is that for me?” I asked. I woke up confused. What did the dream mean? Why that flower? I researched the symbolism of Queen Anne’s lace. Some sources said that…

Midway through the second quarter of the third-place game in the Illinois High School Association boys’ basketball championship tournament, the Rockridge Rockets were down, but rallying. I sat in the bleachers of the Peoria Civic Center with my husband, Dana, and our 16-yearold daughter, Lexi. We were all thinking the same thing. If only Drake were here. Drake, my 14-year-old son, had died in an accident three months earlier. He had played football and baseball and wrestled for Rockridge, and he never missed a chance to cheer for his friends on the basketball team. I’d begged God for some sign that Drake was safe. I could feel my son’s presence in the arena. The stands were a sea of blue, Drake’s favorite color. His classmates wore special shirts that read,…

A man with a troubled past visiting a place with a troubled past has a vision that sends him on a startling spiritual journey. Sounds like the stuff of an allegorical novel, like the global best seller The Alchemist. In fact it’s the true story of that book’s author, Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho. In 1982, Paulo was 35 and at a crossroads. His early years had been tumultuous. He’d been committed to a psychiatric hospital in his teens. He’d experimented with drugs. He rebelled against his strict Catholic upbringing and joined a cult that practiced black magic. He was arrested for promoting subversive activity and spent time in prison. Finally, he got his act together. Paulo and his wife, Christina, were traveling through Europe when they reached Dachau, the Nazi…

This isn’t Stonehenge—it’s Iowa. The ancient stones of Iowa City’s Sacred Stone Circle came from a mysterious 4,000-year-old worship site on the Indonesian island of Flores. How did they end up in America’s heartland? In 2001, Doug Paul, a retired textbook publisher, met an art dealer who told him that the Catholic parish in charge of the Flores site couldn’t afford to maintain it and was seeking to sell the stones. Doug “felt the stones calling to him.” He acquired 400 acres in his hometown that he named the Harvest Preserve, to serve as the artifacts’ sanctuary. It took a ship, a train and several flatbed trucks to transport all 20 stones, weighing 90 tons combined, more than 9,400 miles to their new home, a spiritual haven where, according to…

“I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise— whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” Imagine that this is from some podcast or TV interview. The storyteller has described the many hardships he faced—imprisonment, shipwrecks, hunger, thirst, sleepless nights, beatings—and then he veers into a conversation about visions. A bit cryptically, he refers to a trip to heaven and back. Pretend for a moment that you don’t know this passage is from the Bible, II…

I don’t believe in superstitions, curses or lucky charms. Except, maybe, my ring. The boy who gave it to me was my first love. We met two years ago, during my sophomore year in college. We both had jobs at car dealerships and loved country music. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. After a month of dating he turned to me while slow dancing and said those words every girl wants to hear: “I’m falling in love with you.” Soon, he gave me a ring. The wrong kind of ring. “My mom bought this for me from a hippie outside Walmart,” he said. Yes, those were his exact words. The ring was a thick silver band, with a narrow black inlay that spun in the…