Innehållsförteckning för December - January 2017 från Mysterious Ways

I was a shy, chubby, sensitive kid, often caught up in daydreams, which made me an easy target for the middle school bully—I’ll call him Biff. In class, I’d get wads of paper launched at my head; at lunch, I’d endure a barrage of insults and be exiled to a seat all alone. My art projects were defaced. I’d get “accidentally” tripped in gym. Even friends avoided me for fear they’d be caught in Biff’s line of fire. I don’t know if my parents were aware of how unhappy I was, but for eighth grade, they sent me to a private school an hour away. Eventually, I understood that what I thought was so terrible in middle school was just a grain of sand in the hourglass of my existence.…

I discovered C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia by a happy accident. I plucked The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in the series of children’s stories about the magical land of Narnia, from a rack in my elementary school library. Then, almost as if that one drew the others, a family friend gave me all seven books in a boxed set for my next birthday. I fell in love with Narnia from the very first page, just as countless other children have done in the seven decades since the books were written. In that imaginary world I found talking animals, intoxicating adventures, sword fights, sea journeys, daring rescues. And of course Aslan, the talking lion who is the king of Narnia and the magnetic center of…

The dream was unlike any I’d ever had before or since. It felt so real. With total clarity, I saw a man and a woman stranded at sea in a lifeboat, no land in sight. It was night. They were terrified. Although I wasn’t with them in the boat, I felt somehow involved in their plight, almost as if they were pleading for my help. Still inside my dream, I prayed repeatedly, Lord, that couple needs you. Please come to their rescue. Please save them somehow. I awoke in tears. It was dark out. Looking at my clock, I saw that it was hours before my alarm would go off and I would have to get up for work. It was just a nightmare, I told myself. But the sense…

We sat at the kitchen table, my grown son, Travis, and I. Reminiscing had turned into his confessing his boyhood transgressions. “Remember that time you found beer cans in our garbage?” Travis said. “I told you the neighbor asked to use our recycling bin, but that was really me and my friends. We drank a few beers.” I shook my head, but I knew what a blessed mother I was. When Travis was young, I kept a close eye on him. We lived in the most crimeridden section of Oakland. I took no chances. I drove him to and from school in Alameda, where he was safer. I made sure he had plenty of after-school activities so he was too busy to run the neighborhood streets. I taught him how…

You may not recognize the name Nazanin Boniadi, but you likely recognize her face—the actress has played Barney’s girlfriend on the hit show How I Met Your Mother, a CIA agent on Showtime’s Homeland and, most recently, Esther, the wife of the title charac-ter in last summer’s remake of Ben-Hur. Senior Contributing Editor Rick Hamlin met the cast and crew before a special screening of the film at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. Nazanin had quite a story to tell him for Mysterious Ways. Nazanin was born in Iran and moved to England at a young age. Her family background was Zoroastrian. The religion is one of the world’s oldest, founded in Persia as early as the second millennium BCE, and a major influence on later Jewish, Christian and Islamic…

Hattiesburg, Mississippi Adrian Murry learned that her son, Kendrick, was an organ donor after he died in an accident last year at age 25. She was grateful something good would come from the tragedy. But she needed to know—who had received his heart? According to WDAM News, Adrian wrote to the Mississippi Organ Recovery Agency to find out. Donor and recipient families are told little more than age and gender unless both parties agree to release further information. Clintoria Johnson knew only that her heart donor was 25 and lived in Hattiesburg. She’d waited two years for a healthy heart; her own had been functioning at 10 percent. While she recovered from her transplant, she learned some tragic news. Her cousin Adrian had just lost her 25-year-old son. Was it…

Take a moment. Sit in a comfortable chair, someplace quiet, and close your eyes. Experience the world without sight. Can you sense the air moving around you? What scents do you detect? What do you hear? Deprived of your vision, what do you remember, what do you forget? What would you miss most, if you could never see again? For more than 20 years, I prayed to see things as they were, not just as I remembered them to be. But my world remained dark. I was blind. I wasn’t always. Until I was 48 years old, the only problem with my vision was color blindness—I could see only white, yellow and black, with other hues muted. It sometimes made matching outfits a pain, but it didn’t stop me from…

Coins. Bullets. Buckles. Bayonets. A Civil War relic hunter like me never knew what he’d find in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. During the four years of bloody strife, from 1861 to 1865, the armies had clashed here repeatedly. On a crisp November morning I trekked a long-abandoned wagon trail across Stony Man Mountain, metal detector slung over my shoulder, homemade digger holstered at my side, my leather pouch hanging from a belt around my waist to hold any relics I might find. I hadn’t told anyone exactly where I was headed—we relic hunters don’t like to share—but I knew where I was going. A week before, I’d discovered the remains of a Confederate winter campsite. Now I was going back to examine it in detail. I turned off the wagon trail…

It’s 2010, and the real-estate market has crashed. Guaranty Bank has been taken over and soon everyone will be let go. Gloria Borden, 62 years old, vice president of default services, stares out the window of her office at the Dallas skyline, debating her future. Should she retire? Find a new job? The office is quiet; Gloria is covering for her remaining staff while they get lunch. The customer-servicedesk phone rings. Gloria answers. Gloria: Hello, how may I help you? The Caller: [An elderly woman’s voice] Boy, I’m glad I reached you. It’s unusually warm over here! But at least it’s dry heat. But I guess it’s hotter in Texas, isn’t it? Let me say, you don’t sound like a customer-service representative. I can tell you’re high up. Gloria: [Confused]…

The November morning that Brigette Honey of Huntsville, Alabama, was scheduled for a Cesarean section, her husband, Chris, took a photo before driving to the hospital. Their twins, a boy and a girl, were delivered successfully, but Brigette had chest pains and difficulty breathing. Her blood pressure plummeted. It was an amniotic-fluid embolism, a condition that only 20 percent of affected women survive. Brigette was bleeding internally. Doctors had to act quickly. Friends and family rallied around Chris and offered their prayers. But what gave him the greatest comfort was the photo he’d taken earlier. A halo appeared to encircle Brigette’s head. “Seeing this made me feel like I wasn’t alone.… God was watching over us,” Chris says. Sure enough, Brigette pulled through. “The twins are doing wonderfully,” she told…

Edward Grinnan EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Christmas 1999, my family took the festivities to Mom, since her Alzheimer’s had gotten so bad. On the car ride over to her care facility, I asked my wife, “Does Mom even know it’s Christmas?” It’d been a while since I’d last seen my feisty, independent mom. She’d barely talked the past few months. We arrived at Mom’s and helped her open her gifts. She paid attention to just one. A “12 Days of Christmas” pop-up book from my cousin. Mom turned to the first page and, to our great surprise, began to read. The words were a bit off—three French hens turned into three French houses—but she kept going. She faltered at Day 10. I jumped in to help her finish. Mom sat up straight…

Ice cream was melting in my car on East Pea Ridge Road. My sister, Rebekkah, and I were driving home from the supermarket when she received an important phone call that required her undivided attention. We pulled over; now Rebekkah was deep in a conversation with no end in sight. The Klondike bars we’d bought would be soup before we could get them into the freezer. I rarely ate ice cream, but it was a blazing hot day and I had that Klondike jingle stuck in my head: What would you doo-oo-ooh… So I had gone out and bought a box of six. We each ate two in the car. The other two seemed destined for the trash. Out of my window, I spotted a man in a wheelchair stopped…

Cotton, my brown-and-white Siamese, is like so many other cats: largely indifferent to humans except at certain specific moments, such as when I sit down to watch TV in the evenings and he sleeps on my lap. But Cotton is no ordinary feline. I’ve come to pay close attention to the moments he chooses to make himself known. Cotton came into my life 10 years ago. My husband and I first heard about him when we were eating at our favorite restaurant. Our waitress was complaining about an annoying Siamese kitten she’d adopted. “My wife will take him off your hands. She’s always taking in cats,” my husband said. He wasn’t exaggerating. I already had four! In 2012 I started seeing some of my counseling-practice clients in the front room…

Home is where the heart is, they say. For nearly a decade, our family lived in a cream-and-brown two-story house at 813 Van Buren Street in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. The house had character—there was purple carpeting in my bedroom, a funny little closet off the upstairs bathroom and a small balcony that could be accessed from a heavy wooden door at the end of the center hallway. Mom grew irises and roses in the backyard, and one summer, Dad directed the whole family as we worked together to install a brick patio around the lilac bush. So many memories! One year when my parents took a dance class at the community center, they would come home and polka and schottische with my younger sister, Cathy, and me around the kitchen.…

Karen Talerico On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy left our home in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, uninhabitable. Families and friends sustained my husband and me, and we salvaged what we could from the rubble, but it would be a long time before we could return to our home. For six months we lived in a small hotel room, and for the next year and a half we rented. Meanwhile, our abandoned house was looted, work was delayed and contractors ripped us off. I did my best to stay positive, always focusing on that day when we would move back in. Exactly two years, three weeks and five days after it was destroyed, the house was finally ready for us. Once the movers left and my husband and I were settled…