THE MIRACLE OF ANSWERED PRAYER

Mike Cunningham

December 14, 2014
Think about it. Squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, and reindeer can’t and neither can any of the birds flying through the sky or the fish swimming in the sea. In fact, of all the creatures that God has created, only human beings have been blessed with the ability to engage in conversation with Him. In other words, folks such as you and I have been invited to pray to the King of the Universe.

The Spirit Being who spoke this world into existence desires all human beings to enjoy the miracle of answered prayer. I’ve been hoping and praying that the following accounts will give you folks a better idea of the magnitude of this awesome blessing.   

“The last time Dame Alice von Hildebrand was my guest at Socrates in the City was in November 2013, at the Union League Club. Afterward we had our usual Patrons’ Dinner in the gorgeous wood paneled Lincoln Library of the club. There, Lilly shared an extraordinary story. It happened to her in 1940, when she was seventeen, on board the ocean liner Washington, which was crossing the Atlantic for America.

Lilly grew up in Belgium, to devoutly Catholic parents. In 1940, Hitler’s armies were approaching from the east, so knowing that their two daughters’ lives were in danger, Lily’s parents arranged for their passage to America, where a relative had agreed to take them in. It was June 8 when Lilly and her sister, Marie-Helene, boarded the Washington at Le Verdon. The ship first crossed the tempestuous Gulf of Gascoigne and Lilly became terribly seasick. On the tenth they arrived in Lisbon and all that day were anchored off Lisbon’s coast as scores of people ferried aboard, all escaping the war.

Lilly told me that the ship typically held a thousand people, but because of the dire emergency of getting so many out of war-torn Europe, they took on two thousand. She recalled that the ship’s ballrooms were converted to dormitories.

One night, Lilly was awakened from sleep by loud noises and cries. It was 4:45 a.m. She got out of bed and opened her door to the corridor to see what was going on and saw people chaotically running about, wearing life preservers. She quickly woke Marie-Helene and the two others in their cabin. (It was a first-class, two person cabin, but because of the need for space, it now held four passengers.) They dressed in a mad haste. Lilly remembered that she wore a cotton dress covered with polka dots. She grabbed only her purse and then out into the chaos and din of the corridor they went. They were making their way to the deck, where the lifeboats were, but Lilly was terrified she might loose her sister in the endlessly jostling crowds so she linked arms with her tightly and did not let go. With her pronounced ability for recall Lilly told Marie-Helene that the lifeboat assigned to them was lifeboat number 10. She even remembered where it was. But as they arrived there amid the tremendous chaos, they saw that it was already filled to capacity. No one else was allowed aboard.

As they stood there on the deck near the full lifeboat, they could hear the captain speaking, but neither of them knew enough English to understand. A nearby man who knew French helpfully translated what the captain had just said. It seemed that the ship had been stopped by a German submarine. The Germans had informed the captain that the passengers had precisely one hour to get into the lifeboats and abandon ship, after which the German’s would torpedo it. Huge passenger ships like this one, could eventually be used by the Allies for the war effort, so the Germans planned to destroy as many as possible. Everyone must immediately get off the ship or go down with it. But lifeboat number 10 was already full.

It stood to reason that an ocean liner built for one thousand passengers had lifeboats for roughly that number. So there was no way all two thousand could be accommodated now, at least not without endangering the lives of the people on the lifeboats. Lilly and her sister were simply too late. In that moment, Lilly said, she realized there was no escape for them; they were doomed. She was quite convinced that she was now facing death. As this grimmest reality settled into her mind, Lilly remembers that she turned to face the sea. And as she looked out over the vast Atlantic Ocean, she experienced something transcendent and miraculous. “In one hundredth of a second,” she told me, emphatically and precisely, “I saw my whole life pass before me!” What evidently has happened to innumerable souls-and what one so often hears spoken as a cliché-was literally happening to Lilly in that moment. It was a proverbial eternal moment. Time was suddenly utterly transcended and for an infinitesimally thin sliver of time she stepped into the eternity outside time. Somehow in that moment she saw her entire life pass before her in the smallest detail. She said she somehow saw every single thing she had done and everything she had failed to do; she saw what she should not have done, and she saw all that she had wished for. Then it was over. But when it was over, she says, she knew that in passing over that moment she had been transported from youth to maturity. A moment ago she was a girl and now she was a woman-and it had all taken place in the tiniest fraction of a second. Lilly stood there on the ship overwhelmed and speechless. The experience was so extraordinary and so absolutely sacred that she stood there and said nothing. Indeed, she didn’t share it with a soul for many years. It was a profound and holy secret, she said to me, one that she must ponder in her heart.

But as she stood on that ships’ deck for that most anguishing of hours, prepared to step forever into eternity, Lilly relived the extraordinary vision in her mind, over and over. God himself had revealed something to her and had changed her forever. But at the end of that terrible hour, Lilly and all the others learned that somehow the Germans had changed their mind. The Washington would not take them to the bottom of the Atlantic, and Lilly would live beyond her seventeenth year after all. After this unspeakably good news it took the ship a very long time to begin moving again, but eventually it did resume its journey, taking her to New York, where she has lived these last seventy-four years. She said that the experience convinced her that at the end of people’s lives there might be hope for those who had not yet made their peace with God-and that just as he had given her that vision of her life, he might in his mercy give others this final opportunity to see the totality of their lives and to repent, to turn at last to him and to say: “Forgive me.”  (1)

I highly recommend that all Christians commit the following scriptures to memory and think about them often. I assure you that the time will come when you will be glad that you did.

Job 14:1 (NIV) 

¹ “Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.

Job 14:5 (NIV)
⁵ Man’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.

Here’s another example of the miracle of answered prayer

Actually visiting Heaven is the sort of miracle that makes things like healings seem pedestrian. As I thought about writing this book, I recalled the miracle stories I had heard from so many friends, but I knew of no one who claimed to have visited Heaven. But while I was writing this book I took a trip to Grand Rapids, and there, at a gathering in my friend Sharon’s home, I met a man who had indeed visited Heaven. His name is Andrew DeVries, and he is a regional gift officer at Calvin College, though at the time of his story he was a professor there. In talking to him I realized that I already knew his wife, Kay. She and I first connected on a Bonhoeffer tour I led in Berlin two years ago, when she and Sharon and some other friends went around Berlin with me, to all of the Bonhoeffer sites. Of course Kay had mentioned her husband to me, but she had not mentioned his amazing story. But now here I was hearing it from the man himself.

I should say that like nearly everyone in Grand Rapids-or so it seems to me-Andy is Dutch, and like all Dutch men he is tall and fair-headed. But unlike all others I’ve ever met, he has visited Heaven and returned to tell us about it. I don’t remember how it came up in our conversation, but as soon as he started telling me the story I knew it had to be in this book.

The story begins with a horrific motorcycle accident. In 2002, Andy was taking his motorcycle trip with a friend Jene Vredevoogd, who is, of course, Dutch. They were traveling through Holland, Michigan-which is even more Dutch than Grand Rapids-driving east on Thirty-Second Street, when an eighty-four-year-old woman ran a red light on Highway 31. Her bumper crushed Andy’s leg against the motorcycle’s engine, almost pulverizing the leg. It was broken in more than forty places and the car struck with such force that almost all the flesh was separated from the bone. It was ghastly. If Andy survived-and this was indeed a big if-he would probably loose the leg.

Before the accident, Andy had been an accomplished athlete. He played many sports well, but he played volleyball so especially well that he was part of a team that won the USA Open Volleyball Championship in 2000. This led him to try out for a team representing the states of Michigan and Indiana in the Masters Olympics of 2002. In fact, the tryout for that took place just two weeks before this accident.

Andy recalled the moments following the horrific crash. He said that he was flying through the air, seemingly suspended in time. Time seemed to stop and he felt peaceful-and then everything sped up as his right shoulder smashed through the car’s windshield. He then bounced off the hood and onto the highway, where the car then ran over his other leg. His friend Jene, thinking quickly, immediately positioned his motorcycle to block traffic and called 911. The ambulance arrived fairly quickly, but as the emergency workers prepared to carry Andy into the ambulance, Jene objected. Fearing his friend had suffered a head injury; he insisted they use a backboard to transport him. They did, and Andy now believes this may have saved his life.

When they got to the Holland hospital, the doctors were simply unprepared to deal with Andy’s extensive and life-threatening injuries, so he was immediately airlifted to Spectrum Hospital in Grand Rapids. There, one of the finest orthopedic surgeons was waiting. It would take a superb surgeon to deal with the situation. Most of the ligaments around Andy’s knee had been severed, so his kneecap was literally up near his hip. In the emergency room that evening they reconstructed his knee and pulled ligaments down from his groin to reattach it. A titanium rod was then inserted to keep everything in place.

Four days after the accident the doctors were astounded that the leg was still “alive,” without any vein to provide blood flow. Some capillaries were the only source of blood. But this became increasingly inadequate and an amputation had to be scheduled. But when the time came for the amputation, something odd happened. The orthopedic surgeon took Andy into surgery and had him on the operating table. The doctor marked where he must cut and then placed the saw on Andy’s leg to begin. But somehow he could not begin cutting Andy’s leg. He wasn’t sure exactly why he could not, but even after having gone this far, he stopped. He could not continue. In his mind, he reasoned that he could certainly take the leg off the next day if it was necessary, or the day after that, but once it was amputated he surely could never reattach it. So the doctor cancelled and for the time being the leg remained attached to Andy’s body.

But following this near amputation there were weeks and weeks of surgeries, most of them aimed at saving the leg. For Andy, it was a time of never-ending pain. He said his thumb was almost glued to the button that worked the morphine pump. Every night was filled with pain, so he never really slept properly, and when he did doze off, there were awful flashbacks of the accident. The pain and the surgeries never seemed to end, so it was nearly impossible to be hopeful. Some friends brought headphones and some CD’s containing a combination of Southern Gospel hymns that Andy had learned from his grandparents and others he had sung in the choir. He had never in his life felt his own helplessness so keenly. Andy was a man of strong faith and during this period, he found himself thinking over and over of Jesus and what Jesus had endured for him in his suffering on the cross. Many times Andy sobbed uncontrollably as he thought of it. A number of visitors thought the weeping was from his pain and anxiety, but mostly during this time, Andy recalled, it was out of gratitude for what God had done for him, and for God’s nearness to him during this long trial.

Over time, small improvement occurred, but additional surgeries were always needed. The gastroenterologist said that Andy’s liver was not strong enough to sustain the pressure from anesthesia, so Andy’s leg should come off as soon as possible. He knew that there was little hope Andy could keep it anyway, so to put off the amputation was compromising his ability to survive at all. But for now the gastroenterologist’s advice was not heeded; they would try other things and still hope that the leg could somehow be saved.

One procedure involved grafting skin from Andy’s healthy leg. But shortly after these heroic efforts his body began to retain fluid such that his weight shot up to over 280 pounds. Then his skin turned black, an especially bad sign. At this point decided on a course of treatment called “debridement,” in which dead and damaged tissue is continually removed in order to increase the potential for healing.

Despite all these heroic efforts, however, the situation was undeniably bleak. His overall condition was still poor and not improving. The official hospital report over this time was that he was in “serious condition,” but a number of times things took a turn for the worse, although Andy always seemed to pull back from the brink. Then one day, the doctors saw things take an especially bad turn, one from which they were convinced he would not recover. They now strongly suggested that the family should gather. Andy’s son was at that time in the Grand Canyon, as part of a course he was taking through Calvin College. The college arranged to fly him home. Andy’s daughter was teaching in Florida and she flew home to Michigan as well.

When they were all gathered at the hospital, standing around his bed, Andy was unconscious and unaware of their presence. But as Kay and their children stood there, and as his condition worsened, Andy had what he soon understood to be a vivid glimpse of Heaven.

He found himself suddenly in a different place. He remembers looking at a vast panoramic field. He says it was the most beautiful, calm, serene, and vivid place he had ever experienced. There were trees, flowers, and fauna, but everything he saw was in pale colors. The sky itself was a pale color. Then the colors began to deepen and deepen until they became the most vibrant colors he could ever imagine. It was all so visually stunning that he could even see the details in the tree bark. The wildflowers were every imaginable color, yellows and oranges and violets, and the sky was bluebird blue. Then a wind made the wildflowers in the meadow move the way a rolling sea moves. It was all breathtakingly beautiful.

Then Andy noticed a figure at the edge of the field. It looked like a scarecrow or a skeleton, and it began moving from the far corner toward the middle of the field. As it drew closer, the bones started to take on flesh and the musculature became pronounced. And it was skipping. Andy said that in all his years in teaching he had come to know that skipping is the one form of movement that almost always expresses happiness. It’s very rare that someone skips without having a smile on their face. The man-and Andy now saw it was a man-was actually skipping as he moved across the landscape. As the figure drew closer, Andy saw that it was clothed in the type of clothing he had worn himself, years before. The figure wore Levi’s a Henley-collared shirt with blue and white stripes, and docksider shoes. The face was beaming with joy. As it drew even closer, Andy could see the man’s features. The face seemed familiar. Then he realized he was looking at himself. He was seeing himself in Heaven. For the brief period during which all of this happened, Andy recalled that he felt no pain at all, just joy. He had not been painless for so many weeks. Then suddenly the moment broke as Andy felt a sharp tug on his ankle.

“Dad! Dad!” the voice called. It was the voice of Andy’s son, Drew. But Andy couldn’t imagine having to leave that glorious, peaceful, joyful place. In his mind, Andy shouted, “No!” But then the colors faded back to pale. A white tunnel now appeared and Andy was “whooshed” through it to return to his hospital bed and his pain. Andy was extremely upset to have left what he knew was Heaven, but for some reason he had to come back, and needless to say, he did not die.

But the experience so affected him that ever since it happened, he has absolutely no fear of death. In fact, just the contrary! He says that he looks forward to it with great anticipation, knowing that God has something beautiful and wonderful planned for him. He says that the experience dramatically changed his life.

A few months after all of this, Andy had finally gotten out of the hospital and was making a heroic effort to return to his teaching career at Calvin College. He was in a wheelchair, trying to maneuver through a doorway and having a difficult time, when an assistant chaplain saw his plight. He hustled over to help Andy get through the doorway and said that he couldn’t believe Andy was back at school. He asked if Andy could remember when the surgeon decided against taking his leg. Andy certainly did, and he told the man the time and place of the surgery. The chaplain looked at Andy. “Do you know what was happening on campus at that time?” he asked. Andy had no idea what he was referring to. The chaplain said that at that very time a prayer vigil for his life and his leg was going on in the chapel. Hundreds who knew his situation were praying for him at that time.

The doctor who had brought Andy into surgery-who had the saw on Andy’s leg-later told Andy that it was as though he “didn’t have the strength to pull the saw.” He said that something kept him from starting the sawing motion. Of course, neither he nor Andy knew anything about the hundreds of people that very moment praying that Andy could keep his leg. That night in Sharon’s apartment in Grand Rapids, I saw the leg with my own eyes. It’s still his, all these years later. (2)

I’ve asked the Lord to give each of you folks a couple of examples of the “Miracle of Answered Prayer.” One way or another please let me know. Your thoughts are always appreciated and very helpful.

Lord willing, next week….

1. Miracles © 2014 by Metaxas Media, LLC. Pages 304-306
2. Ibid. Pages 308-313