I was reading a book with a Christian theme on a recent airline flight. The gentleman sitting next to me said, “It would be a whole lot easier to believe in Christianity if there were miracles like there were in Jesus’s time.”
I disagreed. To me, experiencing life is a miracle. The universe works in perfect order every day. The complexity of human DNA is incomprehensible. That a monarch butterfly transforms itself from an egg to a caterpillar to a chrysalis to an adult butterfly is miraculous.
He said he still wished for “old fashioned” miracles. They still happen.
This will be a three-part blog. I will outline four miracles that I have personal knowledge of and I verify are true. I will tell the story of two in this blog and two in the next blog. The third blog will discuss the greatest miracle of all time.
Jake Hoeschler has been a friend since the 1980’s. Jake was on the men’s professional ski tour. During a downhill run at the World Cup in 1970, Jake hit a rut going 70 miles per hour.
It propelled him into the air squarely hitting the trunk of a tree. His body was a mass of injuries and broken bones. He then realized he was not in his body but was standing nearby on a hill. He could see the trainers working on his body below. He could hear their conversations. He then saw a bright white light. Jake said, “I was a tough competitor my whole life. You think I would have fought going toward the light, but I didn’t. I couldn’t have been happier. It was fantastic! It was pure love.” Jake told me, “Then Jesus said to me. It is not your time. I am sending you back.” When Jake woke up in his hospital bed, one of the trainers was sitting next to him. Jake thanked him for working on him. Jake recounted the conversation and what went on. The trainer freaked out and said, “That is impossible. You were dead!”
The second miracle involves the family of Dan Farm. Dan and I worked together for fifteen years. Dan had a younger brother who, unfortunately, developed a brain tumor when he was in high school. No doctor in Minneapolis would perform the operation to remove the tumor due to the advanced stage. Only one doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester said he would operate.
Dan Farm and his parents were in the waiting room during the surgery. Partway through the operation, the doctor came in and said, “The tumor is wrapped around the brain much more than we thought. I can close your son back up and he will at some point die. Or I can continue the surgery which may go okay or there could be a terrible consequence. You have five minutes to give me a decision.” Dan and his family were Christians. They prayed “God, our son has been a gift from you. We thank you for his life. We give him back to you. He is now in your hands.” They told the doctor to proceed.
The Farm family expected to wait for several hours for the surgery to be completed. That didn’t happen. The surgeon returned very soon and exclaimed. “I closed your son back up. When I returned to the operating room to begin working again- to my amazement- the tumor had disappeared. The tumor is completely gone. In my entire medical career, I have never seen anything like this.”
In the next blog, I will tell the stories of a woman who was horribly disfigured and what happened to her and of a person who had an encounter with angels.