I have decided to transform this thread into a space where I report miracles that have impressed me and which I and Christians I know have experienced.

My cousin Darlene was voted high school English teacher of the year for Atlanta.  She is the daughter of a Pentecostal missionary.  Her family used to stay in Winnipeg, my home town, on furloughs from the mission field.  When Darlene was 19, she and her sister transferred from my secular university to Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma.  Both gals rebelled against the restrictions and legalism there. Darlene, her sister, and myself are anything but Oral Roberts fans.

When she and two of her roommates moved to Los Angeles, I was attending a seminary in Pasadena.  She invited me  to dinner with her 2 ORU roommates. All 3 gals were very attractive; so I brought 2 male buddies with me, who were both smitten!  To my great dismay, after dinner, Darlene brought out a small whiskey bottle and challenged me to drink it!  Her smirking roommates assured me that they drink whiskey with a straw!  Eager to impress my buddies and the ladies, I chugaglugged the bottle down!  It was my first ever taste of alcohol and it burned like hell!  But I never let anyone there sense my discomfort.  OK, I was in the clutches of the macho posturing of a 21-yearf-old man.  I tell you this to demonstrate the rebellious spirit of these 3 ORU gals.   I mention all this as background to the miracle she experienced while still at ORU.

One day, Darlene was courtside watching Division I calibre male tennis players smashing balls back and forth at 90 mph.  The moment she looked away, a high-velocity smash struck her in the eye, badly tearing it.  She required emergency surgery the next day to save her sight in that eye.  That night her friends ascended the prayer tower in ORU for hours of healing prayer in her behalf.  The next morning, when she was to be taken up for surgery, the doctor reexamined her eye and exclaimed. "My God, you've been given a flawless brand-new baby eye!  No surgery is required!"  I still fondly recall Darlene's excited letter recounting her miracle.

Don

In one of my visits to my parents in south central British Columbia, I heard about an amazing paranormal event that happened to John, a member of my parents' church.  Some here might find this experience inspirational; so I've decided to post it now and revise it when I learn more details.

John's wife Helen testified to the incident in question to the pastor's wife.  John had been killed in a serious auto accident.   The ambulance paramedics discovered that he had no vital signs (no breathing, hearbeat, or pulse) and John was later examined and pronounced dead by the medical examiner.  Helen was not in the car, but was summoned to the morgue to identify the body.

When the sheet was removed from John's face, she immediately confirmed his identity but asked for some private moments with him.    Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she felt an impulse to pray for his recovery.  She continued her intercession for two hours.   I have prayed over the dead myself, but only for about 5 minutes because I had no expectation of an imminent physical "resurrection."  After two hours of prayer, John suddenly came back to life and has now recovered from his injuries! 

John had no memories of the period during which the doctor was pronounced dead.  He was clinically dead for over 2 hours.  He needed additional surgery and has some lingering health problems.  But he is able to live a normal active life.

Don

Yes, Bets, I consider John's resurrection a marvelous answer to prayer, despite his "failure" to have an NDE. One of the most intriguing questions I'd love to answer is why many clincially dead people DON'T experience NDEs.  What are the medical, spiritual, and psychological factors that trigger or inhibit an NDE? 

Also, you indirectly draw attention to another important question.  Scientific double-blind studies on the power of prayer cannot account for a very important factor.  When the control group is praying for patient illness, we must assume that many of the supposed no-prayer group are receiving private prayers for healing from friends and family members.  This complication makes it impossible to meaningfully isolate prayer and no-prayer groups.   

Don

A pity John Wayne Bobbitt did not think of that as his severed manhood had to be painfully reattached by a surgeon.

But, seriously, Don, how are you so skeptical about some things in this life, and so trusting and believing about other events like this.  I don't know how much of the fingertip was lost; if it were only a small part of the soft connective tissue and he bandaged it right away, he might have had the impression of a miraculous healing....

If he cut through a large piece of bone, ligament, and tendon, then it would have defied all odds of healing, in a conventional medical sense in our "real world" existence.


Matthew

Matthew,

Notice that my post made no claim for the evidential merits of Ralph's testimony.  I recognize the possiblity that there might be some exaggeration in a case or two.  But in most of the cases I'm recounting here, there is no question of that.  Ralph made no mention of the need for bandaging and implied a sizable chunk of finger cut off.  I admit that his is not one of my strongest cases, but I was blown away by his show and tell at the time!  In the case of channeling and past life recall, it strikes me that there is solid evidence for a more plausible alternate explanation. 

Roger, the accidental shooting story was about my premonition of Dallas's death on a hunting trip.  I pleaded with him not to go.  I was playing table tennis with him in his basement when I suddenly "saw" his skeleton and knew he would be killed if he went on his hunting trip as planned.  He attributed my paranoia to my opposition to deer hunting.  I protested that, though I'm not a hunter myself, I have nothinh against the sport.  While hunting, Dallas' gun accidentally discharged when his snowmobile hit a bump and he died from the wound in his shoulder.

Don

I wonder if any of these are really true? Of course they are moving regardless, but if some of them are true they are miracles and amazing.

Are there any scientifically documented cases of miracles? Videotaped etc.

MY 4 DEATH PREMONITIONS

(1) I had recently served as Dallas's Best Man in his wedding.  Shortly after his honeymoon, he invited me over for dinner.  It was a couple of days after Christmas.  After dinner, he, his wife Jan, and myself played table tennis in his basement.  When we stopped playing, Dallas casually announced that he was going deer hunting in northern Manitoba with some friends.  I suddenly "saw" his skeleton and felt a dreadful premonition of his death in a hunting accident.  I informed him of this and urged him not to go.  He scoffed at my premonition and suggested that I was just opposed to deer hunting.  I reassured him that I have nothing against hunting, but just knew his life was in danger if he joined the hunt with his friends.  On New Years eve, some girls informed me that Dallas had just been killed.  He had neglected to lock his rifle and it had discharged into his shoulder when his snowmobile hit a bump.  He bled to death before he could be brought to a hospital.

(2) About a year later, when I was attending Princeton Seminary, I was again about to return home to Winnipeg, Manitoba for Christmas.  A friend, Ted, had just been accepted in Cambridge University's doctoral program in religion and I wanted to borrow his Cambridge catalogue so I could apply too.  But when I saw him in his dorm room, I "saw" his skeleton and felt the dread of a second death premonition.  This time, I said nothing because I didn't sense how he would die. 

While he and a mutual friend entered a New Jersey onramp to a freeway,  my friend drove too fast for the icy conditions.  His car spun out of control and hit a telephone pole at high speed.  Ted was killed, but my other friend suffered only a broken arm.

(3) I had just finished teaching my course lead at St. Bonaventure University and was looking forward to summer vacation.  As I made my plans that weekend, I became obsessed by an insistent thought:
a death was about to occur that directly affected me.  Would I be willing to sacrifice my vacation plans because of this death.  I immediately brushed off this thought as paranoia.  But as the weekend progressed, the premonition became more intense.  I soon feared that one of my parents would die. 

When Monday morning came, I was very agitated and tried to forget about my premonition.  I was about to rush out the door when an inner thought yelled, "Sit down!  You will hear about the death now!"  Startled, I sat down and my phone immediately rang.  It was Dr. Whelan, the chair of our summer Masters courses in graduate theology.  A professor. Cassian Corcoran, had failed to show up for his class and some students had learned where he was staying on campus and went to see if he had absent-mindedly forgotten the time of his first class.  It was eventually determined that he had died in his sleep.  Dr. Whelan pleaded with me to replace him because I was the only professor still around trained to teach a course in that subject.  I gladly complied because I felt that God had used a death premonition to prepare me to agree to teach that course.

(4) I was the minister of a church in Buffalo, NY.  I regularly led a small prayer meeting there and eventually had a premonition that one of our group members would be victimized by at least one tragic unexpected death.  I never mentioned this, but I ended each prayer meeting with a prayer for physical protection for each member of the group.  They no doubt thought I did this routinely, but I had never done this before and only did it because of my premonition. 

Eventually, I left that church.  I heard that the new pastor had discontinued that prayer group, and I instantly knew there would be fatal consquences.  Shortly thereafter, Eleanor was attending her friend's funeral in church.  When she returned home, she found he son Nick, dead at the end of a rope.  Nick was distraught over his failed marriage.  Not long after that, Eleanor herself was killed in a fiery car wreck. Somehow I knew that both deaths would have been prevented if our group prayer for physical protection had been continued. 

A couple of months later, I ran into Eleanor's sister, Joan in a restaraunt.  She told me that 2 factors points to a hidden destiny in these 2 deaths: (a) The night before Eleanor died, she had a dream in which her late husband, Nick, appeared to her in her house and invited her upstairs to dance.  Ordinarily, Eleanor loved to dance with Nick, but she interpreted this invitation as a take-away call to enter the afterlife; and so, she declined.  (b) Nick had died of a heart attack many years prior.  There was a strange coincidence about all 3 deaths.  When Nick, Nick, Jr, and Eleanor died, the clock in their living room stopped at the time of their death!  The clock almost never otherwise stopped.  Were these signs of their destiny?  If so, this destiny was probably not inevitable because I sensed that group prayer could have prevented the deaths of Nick, Jr. and his Mom, Eleanor.

Don