Sometimes, a divine intervention pulls up next to your steaming, smashed up car on the rain-slicked roads in Hollywood, wearing penguin-colored habits, looking down at you with compassionate eyes. “We have been praying for you to accept Jesus,” the nuns say. This is the story of Natalie Cole, who was in the steely grips of a drug addiction at the time of the crash and who credits this brief intervention with saving her life. In her autobiography, she also credits divine intervention with saving her and her husband from a fiery inferno in Detroit. Ms. Cole certainly isn’t the only one with miraculous stories, attributed to a higher power. Albeit inexplicable, these stories serve as a source of hope for millions of people.
Janice Bender was told she had months to live, as the metastatic lung cancer spread throughout her frail body. A medical intervention like liquid morphine and chemotherapy seemed her only hope, but even those options had doctors shaking their heads, telling Janice’s husband, Frank, that he had better prepare for the worst. So Frank quit his job as a sculptor, yet he did finish one task: resculpting the mask that lay over St. John Neumann’s face at his public shrine in Philadelphia.
Father Kevin Moley came from the Church to see Janice and before leaving he placed a relic of St. John Neumann up to her forehead and said a prayer. Instantly, Janice felt a warm, soft feeling expand inside of her and over the next few weeks, dozens of tests confirmed the inexplicable: the cancer had completely disappeared! While they aren’t particularly religious people, the Benders attribute the miracle to the divine intervention of Saint John Neumann. “Maybe St. John Neumann wanted this intercession as a gift to him,” Moley said, commenting that the new face Frank sculpted was “perfect.”
Father Baker is another source of divine intervention in the modern world. Before his death in 1936, he was a respected member of the Lackawanna, NY community, well noted as a protector, as well as an advocate for the rights and happiness of all people. He cared for abused, sick and needy children, first and foremost, but many locals recount numerous stories of the mysterious miracles attributed to this saintly man. Father Baker heard that there had been natural gas found around Buffalo, so he petitioned the bishop for money to dig a well. Despite his reluctance, the bishop agreed. Legend has it that Father Baker stuck an Our Lady of Victory medal into the ground, instructed them to drill in that spot, and the natural gas was found that easily! Additionally, he performed other divine intervention services: curing a girl in a wheelchair, a woman with a ruptured appendix, a man with an immobile severed arm and several people with severe burns. Strangely enough, three vials of his blood were found in his coffin as they unearthed it to move him to a new location, and the blood in those vials was as fresh as the day he had died! He has not yet been canonized as a saint, but locals often pray to Father Baker and find inspiration in their hometown hero.
Sports stars frequently request divine intervention and sometimes, they say, it works! Many of us have a hard time believing things we cannot see, hear, touch or experience with our own eyes. Yet many of us want to believe there’s a higher purpose for us, some force that can help us in our darkest moments, a comforting answer that there’s something out there. Whether you’ve seen a miracle or not, the power of positive thinking and the healing power of faith cannot be dismissed.
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