On the morning of 911, all of a sudden, he started getting these phone calls. The Tower One was hit first, but his mother and wife and friends were calling him and saying, “Stan, Stan, are you okay?” He didn’t even know what happened, because it’s a soundproof building, but when he looked out his window, he saw chunks of fiery debris falling through the air, and that’s when he got concerned.

He went downstairs and was trying to leave, but they turned him around and said, Tower two is fine. Go back to your office. He went back up to his office, and he’s getting more phone calls, so he’s standing there near his desk. He’s looking out toward the Statue of Liberty, and he sees a plane at eye level coming, a jet coming straight toward his office, and it was United flight 175.

He said as the plane got closer, he could even hear the engines revving through that soundproof building. Stanley is one of the few Christians who happened to work at Fuji Bank, and his practice was to sit at his desk every day, eat a soup or salad, and read his Bible. So he had his Bible sitting on top of his desk when he could see the plane was coming straight toward him, eye level contact, he dove under his desk and said, Lord, help me. I can’t do this.

The plane, if you’ve seen replays of when the plane hits the building, right at the last second, it’s coming in level, and then wing tips up right before it hits. The bottom of that wing went right through the top of his office while he was under his desk. The whole plane explodes in a fireball, of course.

The story of how he survived that impact zone, to me, is like the great story from the Old Testament of Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego, that God protected these three Hebrew boys. And in fact, there was a fourth, a fourth one in the fire with them, and we know that was Jesus. And so I don’t want to be a spoiler for the whole story of how he escapes. But it’s quite a moving story.

I will tell you one thing at the end of it, at the end of the day, God put on Stanley’s heart, Psalm 91 and so he’s looking and reads Psalm 91:1. That particular verse kind of became, the whole day, in a sense, because let me read it to you. It says, “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty”. And that describes God’s miraculous protection and the fact that he was spared.

Miraculous Conversion after NDE

One thing that impresses me with the 1400 testimonies I’ve collected, there’s no cookie-cutter approach to God drawing a person, and they’re all so unique and creative, and some of the ones that are my favorites are where the person is a rebel right up to the end. They’re not even looking for God, and he supernaturally apprehends them, encounters them, just like Saul on the road to Damascus.

One of my other favorite stories from the book is about an atheist art professor who was leading an art tour in Europe. He had a medical emergency in Paris, a perforation of the stomach, which was very painful, and it’s kind of like a burst appendix. You have to have surgical attention within a certain number of hours, or it could be fatal, because peritonitis and septic shock can set in and death.

He happened to fall ill on a Saturday in a country with socialized medicine, and French doctors are known for doing their seven surgeries during the week and then taking off the weekend. So the hospital was having trouble finding a doctor to attend to him, and meanwhile, he’s lying in a bed with no sheets, no painkillers, and he’s going south in a hurry.

At a certain point, he hears they can’t find a doctor, and he just sort of gives up. He said he felt like his spirit had left his body. So he’s standing in the room, looking at his body lying there, and then he hears something out in the hallway, somebody calling to him to come with them. And he thought it was the doctors. He said, “Are you from the doctors?”

He thought that they had found somebody to do the surgery, and they started walking down this long, dingy hall that gets darker and darker and darker, and finally, he’s at a point where he’s resisting. He’s saying, “What’s going on here?” And they’re saying, “Shut up, just come with us”.

They take him to the very edge of hell, and he puts up a fight at one point, and they fight against him. He hears the still small voice in his brain saying, pray to God. This is an atheist who’s never prayed, and he hears a voice saying, pray to God. He thinks, I don’t know how to pray.

He had to go all the way back to his childhood in Sunday School to try to remember some little thread, some little bit of prayer. And so he said something like, The Lord is my shepherd, and Jesus loves me, this I know.

They started mocking him, these people who were with him, these creatures. Then he uttered the three most powerful words that you could ever utter in a moment like that. He cried out, “Jesus, save me”.

And they’ll have to read the rest of the story to find out what happens. But it’s God intervening with an atheist who wasn’t even looking for God. And so I hold out hope, and I’ll pray for miraculous healing right up to the 11th hour for people and salvation for people who don’t know him.

Miraculous Courage of WWII Chaplin

Another one of my favorites was meeting the last living D-Day chaplain. At the time he was in service, there were five who went ashore on D-Day. He was the last one living when I met him, probably in the early 90s or mid-90s.

Colonel Russell Barber had conducted services in Weymouth Harbor on the Sunday before D-Day on 11 different ships and handed out pocket Gideon Bibles to the soldiers who were there. If you have watched Saving Private Ryan, you know how intense the battle scene was; the chaplains carried no weapons with them.

When he came ashore in his Higgins Boat, where the front kind of comes down and they all go off, he led his men off that boat, and to think about the courage of doing that when you as he said, “I had no visible weapons, but I had The Sword of the Spirit. He had this amazing confidence that God would protect him.

Immediately, when they landed the boat, another boat next to them blew up with a direct hit. He’s cradling men in his arms who are dying and reciting John 14 to them: Do not be troubled. Trust in God. Trust also in me. Jesus says, In my Father’s house are many mansions.

To actually get to know a man like that was one of the special honors in my life, and he ended up speaking at our two sons’ Eagle Scout ceremonies. Our two boys became Eagle Scouts, and Colonel Barber came to give an inspirational talk to these boy to these young men. So that’s another one of my favorites.

Healing in the Himalayas

Through my son, I met a young man who was doing mission work in the Himalayan Mountains in Tibet, Tyler Connell with the Ekbalo Project, and he shared this story with me about trekking up to one of these remote Himalayan villages. The first person he meets when they come to a Buddhist monastery, this monk comes out, and Tyler asks him if he can introduce him to God through the power of the Holy Spirit and the presence of Jesus.

This monk just puts his hands out, and Tyler takes his hands and starts praying for this monk. The monk’s eyes got really big, and he said, “I feel a peace and power like I’ve never felt before.” And so that was really cool. So, they talked to this monk for a while, shared the gospel with him and and then they came back the next day, and this monk wanted him to meet with other monks who are in the Buddhist monastery.

There was another monk who had been injured in the Nepal earthquake that happened a few years back. They were there after that earthquake, and his back had a severe injury, and so he put out his hands to receive prayer from them, and he said the same thing. He felt this peace and this power like he’d never felt before, but he also got healed.

Tyler refers to this as the day that Jesus invaded a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas. I just love those kind of stories from the mission field. Really, the mission field is the whole world. So it’s in our backyard too.

All of us go through peaks and valleys in our Christian walk, and there are times when we need to be reminded that God is still working powerfully in the world today, and our own faith needs a little boost. I think these stories remind us that the big story didn’t end with the book of Acts.

The Continuation of His-story

I read the book of Acts recently, and got to chapter 28, and I had this sense, wow, Paul’s under house arrest in Rome. Why did it have to end right here? It needs to keep going. I feel like these stories are in that tradition of capturing stories, because history is really His story.

There have been a few people who are drawn, like yourself, to record stories, and these stories can uplift us, encourage our faith, but I think also awaken faith. I know two atheists have read this book so far, one of them is my neighbor. I gave him a copy, and about a week or two later, he showed up at my front door unannounced, and he’d written out a whole list of questions about Jesus. So that led to quite a good conversation between the two of us, and I’m still praying for him that the light would come on.