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Power in manifestation….that’s a miracle.
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Swedish Hitchhiking
Dang! We’d just missed the last train, and there was no way to get home! Berit Arvefjord and I were stuck in Gothenburg, Sweden, with no way to get back to her parent’s home, where she lived and where I was staying. It was a good 1/2 hour train ride, and then a 15 minute walk to get to her suburban home. Walking all that way was out of the question, and there was no way to call anyone. No cell phones…..it was 1980!
Gothenburg is Sweden’s 2nd largest city, located on the western coast of southern Sweden. Living in Oslo, I would occasionally visit the Swedish believers who were part of a home bible fellowship, loosely connected with the same international Christian ministry I was a part of. Berit & I had been at a dance club, where the latest dance craze was called “the Hartlaub Hop.”
You haven’t heard of the Hartlaub Hop? Actually invented by Tommy Davis of Janesville, Wisconsin, as a mockery of how I used to dance, I had shown it to other believers in Scandinavia, especially Berit’s 16-year old brother, Bengt, and he had shown it to all his friends. When Berit & I first entered the dance club, Bengt had run up to me and grabbed me by the arm and dragged me over to a large group of teenagers, yelling, “This is the Hartlaub…this is the Hartlaub!” (In Swedish, of course). Then we’d all gone onto the dance floor, myself in the center of a large circle of Swedish teenagers, as they watched “the Hartlaub” do his thing. Next thing you know, there were 50 of them all doing it, each trying to outdo the Hartlaub himself! Hilarious.
Anyway, there we stood, on the road leading out of town, just outside the downtown area of Gothenburg, with little to no traffic on the road. We had to hitchhike home…at 1 in the morning.
Well, of course, we knew we had to pray. Before we did, I suggested that, since it was going to take a miracle to get a ride, we really challenge God. “Let’s be very specific in our prayer. Let’s ask for a large car. Not a small, European car, but a large, roomy American-made car. A white, American car. And let’s ask that the driver takes us all the way to your front door, instead of dropping us as the train station on the main road. And that the driver is hungry for the things of God.” There. Not too much to ask for, was it? “Oh yeah….and that we get the ride within 10 minutes.”
I was always challenging the believers to be specific in their prayers, and to believe big. So we prayed that very specific prayer. I remember it like it was yesterday. And 5 minutes after we prayed, up pulled only the 2nd car to pass us since our prayer, a white American Motors car, a Pacer. And the driver got born-again on the drive to the front door of Berit’s home!
Praise the Lord!
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German Hitchhiking
Melanie (the same Melanie of “Spirits in the Night” fame ….. see A Few Miracles) and I had to attend leadership meetings in central western Germany, in the spring of 1980. The small town in the area was called Windhagen if you care to look it up on a map, right between Cologne and Frankfurt. It’s in a rather remote location, in a mountainous area. In order to get there, we’d taken a train from Oslo.
We arrived at the station closest to the house where we’d be having the meetings, with no way of getting the last 40 miles to the house. Surprisingly, just as we stepped off the train, Bob & Melissa O’Connell got off a couple of cars in front of us! They’d come from Paris, France, and were doing in France what Mel & I were doing in Scandinavia; that is, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and teaching the Word of God in home bible fellowships.
We decided to exchange partners for the hitchhiking which lay ahead. Melissa & I….Bob & Melanie. I think they got the first ride, but only about 15 minutes after we’d stuck out our thumbs on the country highway just outside the train station, up pulled a Mercedes-Benz.
We sat in the front seat of the grungiest car I’d ever been in in my entire life. I sat in the middle, Melissa next to the door. The guy was about 55 years old, and there was literally garbage everywhere! We discovered immediately that the man knew virtually no English ….neither did we know any German. The man understood where we were going, and so we set off on a 40 miles drive….one of the most miraculous hitchhiking rides of my life.
“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.” That was about the only thing the driver could understand. And boy, did he get excited! He was obviously a highly intelligent man of means, and over the next hour, through pantomiming, single words, and lots of “yah, yah”ing, we came to understand that the man was a brain surgeon, that he was a member of German Parliament, that he was recently divorced, and that he owned and lived on a sizable estate only 5 miles from where we were headed.
He was so excited to hear about Jesus Christ! He invited us and all our friends (about 20 people were at the meetings) to his place. We told him we were sorry but we wouldn’t be able to do that. He brought us to the front door of the remote home we were headed to, and before we got out of the car, he made us promise that we would make sure to have our friends in Germany get a hold of him, because he wanted to know more. Before he left us, with a huge smile and excited wave of his hands, he forced each of us to take his gift of the equivalent of roughly $50.00 in German money! Now that’s a hitchhiker’s dream ride!
Praise the Lord!
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Kentucky Resurrection
About 10 years ago, I was part owner of a company that did furniture road shows at Sam’s Clubs around the country. We imported container loads of mainly bedroom sets from China and the Philippines, and at different Sam’s Clubs (we usually had 3 or 4 shows going at a time), we’d run a road show which lasted 2 weeks. We would set up 3 bedroom sets in a wide place in the entrance aisle, and we’d take orders from shoppers, which orders we would then fulfill after the show ended.
This store was situated in Lexington, Kentucky, and after delivering the 3 model bedroom sets and helping set them up on the Sam’s Club floor, I’d decided to stick around for a couple of days and help out the salesman for the show, Steve Schmidt. I was taking a 10 minute break, shortly after the show began, when the action occurred.
I was sitting at the front of the store, on one of those plastic picnic tables which is bolted into the floor. At the front, where the food is sold…..pizza, subs, that kind of thing. I was sitting alone at the table, eating my lunch, facing the table next to me, which was right next to exit doors, when all of a sudden a crowd formed right next to that table. Apparently a woman sitting at that table had fallen to the ground. She was less than 15 feet from where I was sitting.
From that moment that I realized something was happening, I began to earnestly speak in tongues, quietly to myself, asking my heavenly Father to be involved. There were maybe 10 people crouched down around the woman, so I couldn’t really see her. A man in a manager’s uniform raised his head from the crowd, facing in my general direction, and yelled at someone standing behind me, “Call 911, quick!”
You ever been in a Sam’s Club, or maybe a Cosco Warehouse store? Lots of light, lots of noise, lots of activity. Well, it was weird, because all the time this was going on, people were walking by us with their carts or baskets full of product, chatting merrily as they exited the store with their buys. And just feet away, this remarkable tableau was unfolding.
2 minutes after yelling for whoever was behind me to call 911, that same man raised his head once again, with a panic-y look on his face and said to the guy behind me, “They’ve got to hurry up!” This whole time, I was calmly eating my sub sandwich and praying….somehow I knew this was not going to end badly.
2 minutes later again, the man looked up, motioning to the person behind me. He used his finger to slice across his throat, and mouthed the words, “She’s not breathing!” There was a resigned look on the manager’s face….a look that said, “There’s nothing we can do anymore.”
During this entire incident, there was never any evidence of anyone doing CPR….chest compressions or mouth-to-mouth….of any kind. That I could see.
At that moment, God spoke to me. “Pray for the woman, that her soul come back into her body.” Out loud, though in the din of the traffic in the store, there was no chance anyone could hear me, I prayed, “Father, I command that woman’s soul to come back into her body, in the name of Jesus Christ.” And I continued eating my sandwich.
1 minute later, the woman sat up. I could see her face. All this happened before the ambulance ever showed up on the scene. When it did, the medics looked her over, and then let her continue on with her shopping experience.
Praise the Lord!
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Las Vegan Revival
For a year after I returned to the States from Norway I lived in Las Vegas, Nevada with 5 other guys. We were all what I would term “losers.” One guy had been a cross-dresser, another was a salesman that went from job to job. We lived in a good-sized 4 bedroom home on Karen Drive, for those of you who know Vegas.
I remember Joe Woods & I, every once in a while, we’d pull an all-nighter, where we’d visit casinos we’d never been in before. We never ran out of casinos. We in our home were one of about 12 home bible fellowships in town, and we 6 guys probably gave the local leader of our little Christian ministry the most grief.
One evening, there came to our fellowship a young woman with her 2-year old son. There were about 10 people there that night. I taught on death. The truth of death, from the Bible. And afterward that young woman who was there for the first time came up to me almost in tears. It seems she had had 2 husbands die in the last year and a half. One had asphyxiated from his own vomit in his sleep, he was so drunk. The second had been murdered. This young woman had spent a little time in jail under suspicion of that murder, but had been exonerated.
She was so set free from what ailed her by the truth of death! Her 2-year old son was to go in for surgery on his ears the next day. A 2 hour operation on each ear. He’d had trouble with his ears his whole life, and used to have to go in to the doctor’s for hours at a time to get them drained. They just always bothered him.
I asked her if she’d like me to pray for his healing, and she very excitedly said, “Yes!” So I put my hands over his ears and said a simple prayer asking for the healing of his ears. The next day she brought her boy to the doctor’s for these 2 hour operations, and the doctor spent 15 minutes inspecting each ear before pronouncing that there was nothing wrong with them…..they were healed. Though he could not explain it, it was plain that the operations would no longer be necessary!
Boy, did I get an excited phone call! And the next fellowship, there were 3 more new people at the fellowship. And the next one after that, there were 5 more new people. And 6 weeks after that healing, we happened to have a Saturday afternoon picnic at our house, and there were about 100 people there. And guess what they were all talking about? Jesus Christ and the Word and the power of God!
Entertainers, gamblers, card dealers, nude dancers, Air Force lieutenants, housewives, grandparents, single mothers……the buzz became the power of God which is found in the name of Jesus Christ. And when I left Las Vegas at the end of that year, the fellowships in Las Vegas….all of them, were still going and growing strong.
Praise the Lord!
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Want more miracles?
A Few Miracles
Some More Miracles
The Miracle of Corkscrew Mountain
MMFN – The Man No One Knew
The Miracle of the Norwegian Bus
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See other true stories:
A Few Miracles
Some More Miracles
The Resurrection of Jesse James
MMFN – The Man No One Knew
The Miracle of the Norwegian Bus
The Miracle of Corkscrew Mountain
