Innehållsförteckning för Feb/Mar 2022 från Mysterious Ways

Do you ever feel like you are get-ting pushed in the right direction? Like you’re being mysteriously point-ed toward your next step? I did recently. I moved to a town about an hour away from friends and family. I felt lonely and isolated. I wanted to get more involved in the community. Problem was, I was just so busy. Between caring for my energetic one-year-old golden retriever, Ollie, setting up my new place and attending three family weddings in three months, I barely had time to watch TV before falling asleep at night, let alone socialize. One of the many things I had to do was take Ollie to the dog park every morning before work to help him expend some energy. There were about five “regulars” who chatted at…

In the dream, I stood at the end of a long, straight gravel driveway. At the other end, I could see a white two-story farmhouse. There were no power lines leading to the house. No car in that long driveway. Details revealing that it was an Amish farm-house, similar to the ones I often drove past near my home in northern Indiana. There was something inside that house that drew me there, but what it was, I didn’t know. Fields spread out on either side of me, but I focused on the house. As I got closer, I saw a shimmer of gold out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look. The field was fenced and full—not with rows of crops but with puppies. Golden, fuzzy puppies.…

There wasn’t the slightest breeze that hot morning, but I had three more hours of work to do before I could go home to my family in Ohio. Masonry work had dried up there re-cently, but my friends Bill and Eli needed help with some of their jobs in West Virginia. So I’d reluctantly left my wife and daughters behind on our farm and taken the trip down with my 14-year-old son, Doug. I hoped things weren’t too much to handle back home. My wife tried to be reassuring. But I felt pulled in two directions. Doug and I had spent the week helping to build a retaining wall for a church parking lot. We just had to finish the last course of block, the top row, to complete the job,…

My husband, Don, and I sat on the patio of our home in East Texas, watching the sun set over the lake behind our house as we did almost every night. Though the sky displayed a beautiful array of colors, I was distracted, unable to enjoy it. Don had Parkinson’s disease. We were managing its progression the best we could. Then, a few days before, Don had been diagnosed with a pulmonary aneurysm that might require surgery. It was a tough second blow. As the sun dipped closer to the tree line, I bowed my head and closed my eyes. Lord, how will we get through this? I opened my eyes—and couldn’t believe what I saw. “Don, look!” I said. Shimmering on the lake in the sunset was a perfect…

Thirty-three-year-old Mark DeSantis from Boston, Massachusetts, was riding home in an UberPool, a shared car service, on the Saturday night before Halloween in 2017. The driver pulled over to pick up another passenger. As Rachel Chazanovitz, 31, climbed into the car, Mark saw she was dressed as a Dalmatian from head to toe. According to People, Mark was initially annoyed. Often the ride-sharing service results in a cheaper fee without stopping to pick someone up. But it is always a possibility, hence the discount. It was late, and now he might have to wait for the Dalmatian sitting next to him to get dropped off first. Rachel wasn’t pleased about the potential delay either. It’s going to take for-ever to get home now, she thought. But the tension quickly eased…

Sharon Mellenger. The name popped up one day as a friend suggestion on Facebook. Mellenger was my dad’s last name. Were they related? Dad and I didn’t talk about his father’s side of the family. They weren’t close. I knew my grandfather had been a pharmacist and owned a drug store, and that he had a brother, but not much more. I wasn’t sure if this woman was a relation. Not wanting to tell Dad about her until I knew for sure, I added her and sent her a message. She responded right away. She and my dad were cous-ins! I called Dad, and he was curious to meet her. Since she lived close by, we all agreed to meet at her house. Sharon warmly invited us in. We caught…

Marianne Hussle My sophomore year of college, I studied abroad in Austria. I loved it, but I struggled with homesickness. This was before international cell phone plans and video chats, so I hardly ever got to speak with anyone back home. I decided to take a short trip to Rome, hoping it would take my mind off how much I missed everyone. But it only made it worse. Lord, I wish that at least one person from home was here with me, I prayed while visiting the sites. Waiting in line for the Catacombs, I heard a voice I rec-ognized. I turned and saw my best friend from high school chatting with her parents! Catching up with them later, I felt better than I had in weeks. Some-how, a dear…

I was visiting my daughter at her home in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and decided to go for a late-afternoon run. I knew I wouldn’t go far in the unfamiliar neighborhood, so why lug around my cell phone? I left it on the coffee table and headed out. I jogged on the main road at a leisurely pace and gave myself over to the rhythm of my run, the feel of the wind on my face. Bliss. Not until I noticed the sun setting did I realize I’d lost all track of time. I turned around and headed back. My daugh-ter lived down one of the side streets, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember which one. None I passed rang a bell. Had I run too…

God reproduces and lives out his image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world.Philip Yancey, CO-AUTHOR OF IN HIS IMAGE God is all there is… that includes everything, all possibility and all action, for Spirit is the invisible essence and sub-stance of all form.Ernest Holmes, PHILOSOPHER God changes appearances every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises. One…

When my husband drove me home from the hospital, I asked for a moment to myself. He went out to the garage, and I walked into the living room. I stood there in a daze, fear and desperation welling up inside me. I can’t believe this is happening, I thought. I’d gone to the hospital three days before for what had seemed to be a kidney infection. I thought I’d just be prescribed some antibiotics and sent home. Then the doctor came in with my test results, her face som-ber. She reached out and touched my arm. “I am so sorry, Susan,” she said. “You have Stage IV non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” As my doctor talked me through my diagnosis, my mind raced. It was the most advanced stage with the lowest…

I was sorting through old photos with my mother, looking for a specific picture of my father. I’d recently got-ten a scanner and was in the process of digitizing our family pictures. “Where on earth is that picture of Mumpsy and Dad?” I asked. I’d seen the picture in a frame at my grandma Virgie’s house when I was a child. It showed my father as a boy, in a suit, holding his beloved Boston terrier, Mumpsy. It was one of my favorite pictures of him, and the only one I hadn’t found yet. “Maybe Jean has it,” said Mom. “We could ask her.” I looked at Mom as if she had three eyes. She could not be serious! Grandma Virgie had had two sons, Dad and Uncle Ralph, who was…

One morning, as I swept the kitchen floor of our family’s small rental house, I found myself returning to my new go-to prayer. God, please let me get some decent furniture for this place. A second car would be nice. A house of our own too. Come to think of it, what we really need is a better-paying job for my husband, Bill. Bill was an industrial engineer, but money was tight. We’d transferred from South Car-olina to Georgia for his new job. My out-of-state teaching license didn’t allow me to con-tribute to our income as I always had. My days were filled with laun-dry, cooking, cleaning and taking care of our three boys under the age of three. It was exhausting, and I of-ten grew frustrated. I swept the…

A few days before my grandson Evan’s confirmation, he and my daughter, Lori, stopped by my house. Lori hadn’t yet purchased 14-year-old Evan a new suit for the big day. With the way he was growing, she didn’t want to spend money on one he wouldn’t be able to fit into in a few months anyway. But they were running out of options. “Can we go through Dad’s clos-et?” Lori asked. “It was Evan’s idea. Maybe we can find something that will work.” It had been four years since my husband, Leo, had passed. I still had most of his things, because I couldn’t bear to part with them. His closet remained untouched. I missed Leo a little extra with the confirmation upon us, and I could tell Evan did…

My son Jonathan passed away in 2007 from a heart attack. He was just 17 years old. In the weeks following his death, I walked around in a grief-filled daze. Lord, please give me one last mo-ment with him somehow, I prayed one evening almost a month after his death. I didn’t know what an answer to that prayer looked like, but I believed I’d feel so much bet-ter if I could just see his face one more time. I fell asleep that night, and the next thing I knew, I was looking at a familiar figure at the foot of my bed. Were my eyes playing tricks on me? I squeezed them shut and opened them again. No. There, clear as day, was Jonathan! He had been buried in…