Hope & Miracles Read online

  Contents

  Foreword, Allowing Miracles, John Edward

  Introduction, Divine Timing, Natasha Stoynoff and Amy Newmark

  ~Messages from Heaven~

  1. Jesse in the Sky, Scarlett Lewis with Natasha Stoynoff

  2. Embracing a Second Chance, Claudia McCants

  3. A Feather from Heaven, Tina Wagner Mattern

  4. Find Your Rainbows, Sharon Babineau

  5. The Last Dance, Nancy Emmick Panko

  6. A Note from Heaven, Cathy Stenquist

  7. A Spirit of Hope, Carol Marsden Taylor

  8. Paradise Cove Revisited, Elizabeth S. Kline

  9. Spiritual Connection, Julia Lucas

  10. Mom’s Garden of Three, Beckie Pruder

  11. Fleur-de-lis, Diana Creel Elarde

  12. Brotherly Love Bridges the Gap, Janet Sheppard Kelleher

  13. Send Me a Penny, Maureen Buckley

  ~Miraculous Healing~

  14. Never Walk Again? Beulah Dobson

  15. A Glimpse of Heaven, Mary Ann Klein

  16. The Healing Hand of God, Donna Fawcett

  17. Walking the Talk, Jim Solomon

  18. The Falling Air Compressor, Carol Goodman Heizer

  19. A Life Well Loved, Shirley Irene Dilley

  20. Mica’s Miracles, Halia Grace

  21. The Amazing Foul Ball, Bob Dreizler

  22. Miracle Times Three, Theresa Sanders

  23. Tears of Joy, Barbara S. Canale

  24. Silent Night No More, Cynthia McGonagle McGarity

  ~Touched by an Angel~

  25. The Visitor, Cheryl Bland Oliver with Natasha Stoynoff

  26. When Hope Found Me at the Beach, Christy A. Caballero

  27. My Lucky Day, Leona Campbell

  28. Angel at the Wheel, Joyce Laird

  29. The Touch of Love, Mary Carroll-Hackett

  30. It Was Not Our Time, Karen Vincent Zizzo

  31. The Green Signal, Roopa Banerjee

  32. Reflections of Hope in the Snowstorm, Valaree Terribilini Brough

  33. Angel with a Silver Belt Buckle, Kristen Margetson

  34. Aunt Jeanne, Jackie Minniti

  ~Against All Odds~

  35. A Road Less Traveled, Dana Liesegang with Natasha Stoynoff.

  36. Let’s Make a Deal, A.B. Chesler

  37. Twenty-Six-Ounce Miracle, Dale N. Amend

  38. Divine Tapestry, Linda Newton

  39. The Box, Rob L. Berry

  40. Against All Expectations, Judy Buch

  41. Coming Home, Jan Penton Miller

  42. A Bit of Dad, Beth Huettner Olsen

  43. Can You Hear Me Now? Darla S. Grieco

  ~Divine Intervention~

  44. Heavenly Voices, Deborah Voigt with Natasha Stoynoff

  45. All the Luck I Need, Stephen Lautens

  46. The Lucky Strike, Marti Davidson Sichel

  47. One Sunny Afternoon, Pat Wahler

  48. Not Interested, Eloise Elaine Ernst Schneider

  49. Voicemail from God, Nick Walker

  50. Riding Shotgun, Marie-Therese Miller

  51. Is Anyone Listening? Danny Carpenter

  52. Divinely Choreographed, Lola Di Giulio De Maci

  53. Mother’s Day Surprise, Connie K. Pombo

  54. From Attitude to Gratitude, Eva Carter

  ~Answered Prayers~

  55. Expect Miracles, Immaculée Ilibagiza with Steve Erwin

  56. Before the Baby Comes, Sally Willard Burbank

  57. Faith Happens, Cynthia Zayn

  58. Circle of Prayer, Cathi LaMarche

  59. April Showers, Bonnie Compton Hanson

  60. Irish Angels in New York, Dani M. Stone

  61. My Two-Second Miracle, Beverly F. Walker

  62. The Textbook, Helen Wilder

  63. Soda Miracles, Sandy Novotny

  64. A Precious Mess, Beth Saadati

  ~Think Positive~

  65. The Godfather and His Daughter, Rita Gigante with Natasha Stoynoff

  66. Recovering Together, Jesse Malarsie

  67. Much More than Hope, Barbara Beaird

  68. Our Silver Lining, Trish Bonsall

  69. The Missing Key, Sandra Sladkey

  70. Circle of Compassion, Nancy Engler

  71. A Divine Letter, Claire Fullerton

  72. The Dance Encounter that Changed My Life, Leslie Tierney

  73. The Full Circle Miracle, Diane Stark

  74. Teacher in a Wheelchair, Curt Melliger

  75. Music Is His Voice, Elizabeth Adinolfi West

  ~Dreams and Premonitions~

  76. Divine Mothers, Ghanshyam Singh Birla with Steve Erwin

  77. Small Voice, Big Message, James A. Gemmell

  78. The White Owl, Laura Lee Perkins

  79. The Voice, Jolene Starr

  80. Conduit for a Dragonfly, Kathleen Pellicano

  81. An Angel for Becki, Heather Rae Rodin

  82. Hold Fast to Your Dreams, Kathy McGovern

  83. The Song and the Dance, Mary Pat Johns

  84. Rainy Day Rescue, Deborah J. Kinsinger

  85. A Green and White Dixie Cup, Cathy S. Baker

  86. Hope and Reality, Terri Webster

  ~Mysterious Miracles~

  87. Deep Faith, Jeanie Jacobson

  88. Money from Heaven, Julia Shepherd Tang

  89. When the Rocks Cried Out, Bette Schumann

  90. A Flash of Faith, Judee Stapp

  91. A Thousand-Dollar Miracle, Laurie Carnright Edwards

  92. A Message of Hope from the Dragon Lady, Edward A. Joseph

  93. Glitter and Glue, Deborah Gatchel

  ~Miraculous Reunions~

  94. He’s Waiting, Natasha Stoynoff.

  95. The Season for Discovery, Gail Sellers

  96. The Mark of Angels, Teri Goggin-Roberts

  97. The Spoon, Sunny Fader

  98. A Family Miracle, Pamela Chaconas

  99. A Second Second Chance, Susan Blakeney

  100. A Voice from the Past, Olivia de Winter

  101. It’s Never Too Late for Miracles, Ann Hoffman

  Meet Our Contributors

  Meet Our Authors

  Thank You

  About Chicken Soup for the Soul

  Share with Us

  Changing lives one story at a time™

  www.chickensoup.com

  Foreword

  Allowing Miracles

  If you ask people to define what a “miracle” is, odds are a lot of them will describe an epic, Cecil B. DeMille movie moment, like Moses raising his staff to the sky as God parted the Red Sea or Jesus of Nazareth bringing Lazarus back to life four days after he’d been dead and buried.

  These are the kind of larger-than-life miracles that are described in the Hebrew and Christian bibles—and in the scriptures of other religions, as well—stories that capture people’s attention big time. As far as defining miracles go, these dramatic, God-like moments are at the top of the list.

  But the list doesn’t end there, thousands of years ago in faraway lands. Miracles don’t only happen to people we will never know who are long gone.

  Today, we hear about all sorts of modern-day miracles. Everyone’s heard about the mother who, in a burst of adrenaline, can lift a 3,000-pound car to save her child pinned underneath. Recently, there was a story in the newspaper about a ninety-one-year-old woman in Poland who was dead in the morgue for eleven hours before coming back to life in a body bag, leaving doctors stunned.

  In Chicken Soup for the Soul: Hope & Miracles — 101 Inspirational Stories of Faith, Answered Prayers & Divine Intervention, you will read about all sorts of miracles that happen every day to people you may know: A woman who takes ill while driving feels the hands of a deceased friend take over the wheel for her;
A little girl badly burned in a campfire sees her burns heal overnight after a prayer vigil; A teenager hears a voice that tells her to take a walk outside, and it leads her to an area where she saves a woman’s life.

  Some miracles of life are so common that people take them for granted. A baby coming into the world is a miracle, as is someone passing away and crossing to the Other Side. Every year when spring arrives and the trees in my back yard begin to bud, I’m amazed. To me, these small miracles are just as awe-inspiring as the larger-than-life ones of the old days and the modern ones we hear of today, and I’m grateful for each and every one of them.

  The point is, miracles come in all shapes and sizes, and this book is filled with a wide variety of them. The personal stories you’ll read here about hope, faith, answered prayers and divine intervention are to me all about one thing—our connection to a higher power or divine source.

  It’s a connection we all have, and recognizing that is the first step to allowing miracles, big and small, into your life.

  In the work that I do as a psychic medium, that is the most important truth I try to convey. At my events all over the world, the question I’m most often asked no matter what country I’m in is: “How can I get a stronger connection with the spirit world and how can I do what you do?”

  I always correct people who insist that I have a “gift.” I don’t look at it that way. I have an ability — it’s something I’ve had since childhood for as long as I can remember. But it’s an ability we all have to some degree, one that everyone can tap into and strengthen if they choose to. It’s all about noticing, embracing, and welcoming it into your life.

  “There is an energy out there,” I explain to audiences, “and you are made of this energy. You can call it ‘chi’ or you can call it ‘prana.’ You can call it a higher power or you can call it ‘God’ or ‘Yahweh’ or ‘Allah.’ I don’t care if you call it ‘Sam.’ It doesn’t matter what you label it. It just matters that you acknowledge that this unseen energy is there.”

  Once you make that connection, miracles await you like a new world awaiting discovery. When Christopher Columbus set out across the Atlantic Ocean, he didn’t know for sure what he would find. But he had to have hope and faith that a new world was out there in order to find it.

  It wasn’t a blind faith, mind you. I’m not a fan of the kind of faith in which people believe everything they are told and don’t question anything. People are surprised when I describe myself as a “healthy skeptic” in my approach to life, but I am and always was.

  So while I’m not a fan of blind hope, I am a fan of what I call “inspired” hope.

  In this book, in the story “Never Walk Again?”, doctors tell eighty-nine-year-old Beulah Dobson that she won’t be able to walk after breaking her vertebrae in a fall. But she refuses to give up hope that she will, and her hope is not unfounded. She doesn’t lie in her bed waiting for an impossible miracle to happen. She senses the possibility of it and prays and works hard exercising, willing her feet to move a little at a time each day until she helps to make her miracle happen, until she walks again. She was hopeful, but also inspired.

  Prayer is a way for us to invite divine intervention into our lives.

  I pray every day, sometimes using a rosary but not always. In my book, Practical Praying, I talk about praying with intention. It doesn’t so much matter what prayer you say or if you get on your knees when you do it or walk the dog around the park as you do it. What’s important about the act of praying is that just in the doing of it, you are stating an intention to the universe, to the higher or divine source.

  In “Jesse in the Sky” Scarlett Lewis prays with heartbreaking intention as she cries in a bathroom stall in the Orlando airport. When she leaves the airport, the answer to her prayers is written in the sky—literally.

  Praying is like setting the Thanksgiving table before the guests come. When you say a prayer, you are welcoming the miracles into your house to sit at your dinner table. Prayer is a way for us to imagine the undiscovered land we hope to find before we even see it.

  Maybe in today’s world, we don’t expect seas to part or water to turn into wine. But as this inspiring collection of stories shows us, we can hope for miracles when we need them. And sometimes, they arrive when and how we least expect them.

  ~John Edward

  Editors’ note: John Edward is one of the world’s foremost psychic mediums. His clientele has included people of the clergy, law enforcement agencies, and people from everyday life. For thirty years he has used his abilities to connect people with loved ones who have passed on—in private readings, at public events all over the world, and on his internationally syndicated talk shows, Crossing Over with John Edward and John Edward Cross Country.

  He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times best sellers One Last Time; What If God Were the Sun; Crossing Over: The Stories Behind the Stories; After Life: Answers from the Other Side; Final Beginnings; Practical Praying: Using the Rosary to Enhance Your Life; Infinite Quest, and his most recent novel, Fallen Masters.

  Introduction

  Divine Timing

  Life calls the tune, we dance.

  ~John Galsworthy

  Amy: Natasha and I are running late finishing this book. But we’re used to that. Because we’re writers, and perfectionists, and we always take on too much! I was always this way. I was even born sixteen days late according to my mother, but hey, perfection takes time, right?

  Natasha: I, on the other hand, arrived in this world early. Minutes ahead of my twin brother, I was born on December 31st in the year The Beatles first appeared on Ed Sullivan, and two months premature of my March due date.

  But that was the first and last time I’ve ever been early—or even on time—for anything in my life. Since my birth day, I’ve been late for school exams, family weddings, court duty, surgeries, flights to Paris, and interviews with A-list celebrities whom I kept waiting on their yachts, to the exasperation of all who know me, love me, or hire me.

  “You’re cursed,” they tell me.

  “Maybe,” I shrug. “But one day, I’ll be crazy lucky.”

  Because if my rudimentary calculations are correct, at one point in my life when I least expect it . . . all my stars will align like never before, and in a sublime act of supernatural intervention saved up for that one moment, my tardiness will save my life.

  Amy: It may sound like rationalization, but we both have great stories about times when being late, through some kind of divine intervention, actually saved lives.

  Natasha: My theory begins with my grandfather on my father’s side, Stavro Shaumanduroff, who was famously late for a boat once.

  It was the spring of 1912 and he was a handsome, strapping man of eighteen preparing to voyage across the ocean to America. The family had recently fled their home village of Smurdesh, Macedonia, after various invasions and uprisings. A relative of my grandmother, Vasil Chekalarov, was a fierce, legendary revolutionary until Greek troops captured him and chopped his head off, parading it through the village as a warning to others.

  The family transplanted to Sofia, Bulgaria with a plan: Stavro would set sail for New York with a third-class ticket and two boyhood friends, work long hours there on a factory assembly line for several months, then return with pocketsful of coveted dollars.

  The future of the family, his father told him, was in Stavro’s strong, Slavic hands.

  Apparently, it was also at the bottom of his coffee cup.

  Before the journey, his mother, Stoyanka, served her son some Typcko Kaфe, then peered into his drained cup to read the coffee grains settled on the bottom. The family gathered around as she squinted.

  “Neh,” she said, shaking her head back and forth, pointing to the broken line of sludge in the cup. “Not good. Stavro, you no go this time.”

  Her pronouncement caused an uproar. The Shaumanduroff women were respected for their fortune-telling abilities, but this was news no one wanted to hear.
Never mind the coffee grinds, he was going!

  Stavro took a train to Southampton, England, to meet his buddies and catch the boat. On the morning of April 10th, he stood on a dock looking up, up, up with eyes as wide as the donkey-cart wheels back in Smurdesh.

  The Titanic was humongous, shiny and beautiful, and he couldn’t wait to get on her. But as the hundreds of passengers boarded the luxury liner, Stavro couldn’t find his friends; they had missed their train to Southampton. He waited until he heard the triple-blast horns at noon signaling final boarding, then raced to the boat with his father’s words ringing in his ears:

  “The future of the family depends on you. You are our hope.”

  He reached the vessel just in time to see the lines cast off and Titanic freed from land.

  “You’re too late,” a dockworker said. By twenty minutes.

  Amy: Later on in this volume, you’ll read about Natasha’s other grandfather, who also made it to the U.S. from Eastern Europe and brought his family over through a series of fortuitous coincidences and lucky breaks. I’m glad it all worked out since it has been such a pleasure putting together this collection of jaw-dropping stories with Natasha. She has shared many of her own stories in this book, and I think you’ll have trouble putting it down. I have come away from working on Chicken Soup for the Soul: Hope & Miracles even more convinced that there are good reasons for hope, that good things do happen to good people, and that our lives can be filled with miracles if we stay open to them.

  Natasha: I’ve come away more convinced, too. And I have a second story of divine intervention to share! Let’s skip ahead sixty years to a cloudy fall morning in 1972 in the Windy City, one week before the U.S. Presidential Election. The mood in the Democratic campaign headquarters was somber. The Watergate break-in had happened a few months earlier but the young staffers, including my friend Jamie — a recent Columbia University grad—still knew that George McGovern stood no chance against Nixon.

  Jamie’s job in the Chicago press office was to write news releases and distribute campaign schedule updates to the Woodward-and-Bernstein-types covering the election in their smoke-filled newsrooms. The Xerox telecopier transmitted copy at a speed of six minutes per page!