The Miracle That Began My Journey to Jesus

At the age of twelve, I was a spiritual lightweight with heavy questions: Is God real? If He is, does He exist now or only in the past? Does God know who I am? Is He really watching over my every move? Will He answer my prayers? When people say God has spoken to them, are they lying or delusional? Does God really speak audibly, and if so, why can’t I hear Him?

And there were questions about Jesus. Who exactly was He? What did it really mean to say that Jesus was the Son of God? Was Jesus somehow God Himself? And how could God be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

The list went on.

What little I had learned about God came from extended family, friends, and limited reading of the Bible. The fragments I’d gathered from these sources, as well as from differing Christian traditions and Jewish friends, did not present an intelligible or cohesive description of God. Instead, they elicited still more questions.

I did not yet understand the Gospel. I did not have what I would today describe as a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I knew something about Jesus, but I did not yet really know Him.

And then something happened that I have never been able to explain away.

It was a quiet, peaceful afternoon during my summer vacation from school in 1960. As an adolescent without a job, I found the summers provided ample time for baseball and thoughtful contemplation with little stress. My parents were working; my brother was down the street playing with friends; I was alone in a perfectly silent home.

Lying on my bed with nothing to distract or interrupt me, my thoughts inevitably turned to those well-worn paths of religious questioning.

What exactly would a world without beginning or end be? If God was eternal—existing before any physical matter or substance existed—who would be in this eternal world, even if at some point the world no longer existed? I wasn’t concerned so much about how all living things were created or how this universe might ultimately end, but rather about the incomprehensible nature of an eternal God.

My mind was totally occupied with the possibility of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God.

I was not attempting to induce a mystical state. I was not praying for a miracle. I had no expectation that anything unusual was about to happen.

I was simply a twelve-year-old boy asking questions.

Then, without warning, something changed.

While in this meditative state, I felt totally at peace—removed from the confines and constraints of my body. I could almost describe it as an “out-of-body” experience, although that description still seems inadequate. I felt weightless, as though I were suspended above the floor of my room. I felt physical warmth, peace, quietude, painlessness, and great joy.

But those surreal sensations were dwarfed by something far more important.

I became vividly aware of the presence of God.

There was no physical vision. I heard no audible voice. Yet there was an awareness of His presence unlike anything I had ever experienced before—or have experienced in precisely the same way since.

I was enveloped and embraced by what seemed to me like a bright, warm light, and I was filled with comfort and indescribable love. It was not unlike the comfort I often felt as a child simply being in the presence of my parents, even when there was no physical embrace or verbal communication.

But this was infinitely greater.

The pure, unconditional love I felt that day was reassuring and undeniable.

Today, more than six decades later, and after a lifetime of studying, questioning, praying, and following Jesus Christ, I view what happened to me differently than I did then. At twelve, I knew only that I had somehow encountered God.

Today I believe I had been given a miraculous glimpse of the love of the God who would eventually draw me into a saving, personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

I didn't understand that at the time. How could I?

But Christ did not need me to understand everything before He began working in my life.

Oh, to remain in that state forever.

But too quickly—in minutes—I felt myself drifting away from that loving embrace. As awareness of my body and physical surroundings crept back into my consciousness, I desperately wanted to return. Yet sustaining the experience seemed completely beyond my control.

A few days later, I experienced a brief recurrence of that experience.

Then it stopped.

Every future attempt to recreate it failed.

That fact became increasingly important to me.

If I had deliberately produced the experience through meditation, why couldn’t I produce it again? Why could I not summon it whenever I chose?

I tried.

Nothing happened.

As I grew older, I repeatedly and futilely sought that transcendent experience. For years I feared that perhaps I was drifting away from God because I couldn’t return to the same feeling of closeness I had experienced at twelve.

Perhaps, I wondered, my mind had become cluttered with too many competing thoughts.

But the questions continued.

Why had I been given this experience when I had no personal relationship with Jesus or understanding of saving grace? Had I experienced the love of Almighty God? And was this God somehow the same Jesus I had heard about?

What did the Trinity actually mean?

Why would a young boy be given such a glimpse of God without having the theological knowledge necessary even to understand it?

I didn't have answers.

But I never doubted that what had happened was real.

And that is why, looking back, I now regard it as one of the first great miracles of my life.

I had not asked for it. I had not created it. I could not repeat it. It came at the very moment when a questioning twelve-year-old desperately wanted to know whether God was real.

And the answer I received was not an argument.

It was an encounter.

Despite my unanswered questions, I always recognized the experience as a gift from God, but for many years I kept it largely to myself. As an adult, I worried that if I shared the event, others might consider me crazy or place me on the extreme religious fringe.

Eventually I decided to risk telling the story.

At a retreat of the lay leadership of my church, I finally recounted what had happened. To my amazement, two other influential church leaders shared that they had experienced remarkably similar life-changing events during their adolescence. During moments of contemplation over similar questions, they too had become profoundly aware of God’s presence.

And just like me, neither had been able to reproduce the mystical state later in life.

Again I wondered: Why?

Why had we been given these glimpses of the Divine? Why had they occurred only briefly? What was the purpose of a lifelong yearning to return?

Could even that yearning be part of God’s plan?

Years later, another remarkable piece of the puzzle emerged.

During my studies at Yale Divinity School, I wrote a research paper on Saint Augustine and read about two mystical ascensions he experienced more than 1,700 years ago and described in his Confessions.

I was stunned.

Like me, Augustine felt weighed down and rapidly pulled away from his mystical experiences. And like me, he desperately wanted to return.

Augustine interpreted those ascensions as gifts from God—glimpses of the Divine that he could not manufacture himself.

As I read his ancient account, I marveled at the similarities.

Here I was, almost fifty years after the experience in my childhood bedroom, reading the testimony of one of Christianity’s greatest theologians, written more than seventeen centuries earlier.

Once again I felt God speaking to me—not audibly, but unmistakably.

And now, as a Christian who had come to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, I could understand something my twelve-year-old mind could not.

The purpose of that childhood encounter was never to teach me a technique by which I could repeatedly ascend to God.

It was to point me toward Him.

And ultimately, to point me toward Christ.

My church friends and I eventually came to understand that permanent reconciliation with God does not come through meditation, mystical experience, intellectual achievement, or our own efforts.

It comes through the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

My experience at twelve could not save me.

Jesus could.

The experience could reveal God to me. It could awaken faith. It could create a lifelong hunger to know Him. But salvation itself would come through accepting the sacrifice and redeeming grace of Christ.

That distinction has become clearer to me with every passing year.

My adolescent experience convinced me that mystical encounters with God are possible and that accounts of such experiences throughout Christian history deserve serious consideration. But more importantly, I believe my brief encounter was a providential gift specifically suited to a questioning twelve-year-old boy.

I did not trigger it.

I believe God willed it.

And today I would go one step further.

I believe Jesus Christ was already reaching for me long before I understood that I needed to reach for Him.

God was not visible to me in an earthly sense, but I came to “see” and “know” Him in a deeply personal way. That gift of faith eventually led me to salvation through Christ and into the relationship with Him that has shaped the rest of my life.

More than sixty-five years later, I can see what I could not possibly have understood at twelve.

I had been asking, God, are You really there?

And in a way perfectly suited to me, He answered.

For me, that was a miracle.

For Reflection

Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me
into glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has
nothing I desire besides you.

Psalm 73:23–25

I believe God provides experiences that reveal His existence, strengthen our faith, and give guidance. These revelations can occur not only when we are children but at any time during our lives.

At a crucial time of spiritual questioning, my childhood experience undeniably confirmed to me that God was real and aware of me. I did not yet understand Jesus Christ or saving grace, but I believe now that Christ was already drawing me toward Himself.

That realization makes the experience even more miraculous to me today than it seemed at the time.

I can joyfully echo the Psalmist: “You hold me by my right hand.” Looking back over my life, I increasingly recognize that Jesus had hold of that hand even when I did not yet fully understand whose hand was holding mine.

Some of us are fortunate enough to recognize God’s presence at the moment a revelation occurs. Others recognize His hand only in retrospect.

Think back on your own life.

Were there moments—perhaps during distress, danger, loneliness, questioning, or even extraordinary joy—when something happened that seemed unusually well- timed or inexplicably comforting? Did you dismiss it as coincidence?

Perhaps it was.

But perhaps it wasn’t.

The passage of time has a way of sharpening the lens through which we view these experiences. What once appeared to be an unexplained moment may eventually look very different.

For me, an afternoon in a small bedroom in 1960 has become increasingly clear with every passing decade.

I believe Jesus Christ was beginning a relationship with me before I even understood enough to call out His name.