An Obvious Miracle

by Ray Comfort

I was pretty exhausted after a
full weekend of ministry. Kirk, myself and Duane Barnhart, our producer had
flown from LA to Chicago, to Springfield, and then driven to Branson in Missouri
for a conference. After the conference we had had the great joy of preaching the
gospel (open air style) inside a mall to hundreds of people.
Afterwards, I interviewed a man
who was holding a large white duck. As the interview unfolded I found that he
was a comedian in Branson. He said, "How would you like to shake hands with
a duck?" I immediately reached out and shook hands with the bird. Then he
said, "Have you ever shaken hands with a duck before?" I said that I
hadn't, to which he replied, "You still haven't. That was his foot."
I was then driven back to
Springfield, where I flew to Dallas, then to Houston and then Memphis, and then
back to Los Angeles. It was late on Sunday night, I was tired but I couldn't get
to sleep because I was in the insomniac row. The very back row in a plane is the
row in which the seats don't go back. Besides, the lady next to me had a toddler
on her lap and the little cutie tended to scream if I wasn't pulling faces,
doing "the light show," or making weird noises.
After three hours of face-pulling
and intermittent writing, I decided to get up and give the flight attendant a
copy of What Hollywood Believes. She was excited and showed the book to a man
who was sitting across the aisle from me. That gave me an opportunity to try and
witness to him. As he was fingering through the publication, I passed him a copy
of the CD of the same name. He asked what the book and CD were about, so I told
him that it was about Hollywood celebrities and what they believed about the
afterlife. I then asked him what he thought happens. He didn't answer with much
conviction, and as we were talking across the aisle, the sound of the engines
tended to kill any meaningful conversation. I decided to change gears a little.
I told him that I co-hosted a TV
program with Kirk Cameron--where we go to the streets and ask people questions
like that. Then I asked what he did for a living. He said that he was a movie
and television producer, so I asked him if he would like me to mail him his own
copy of the book. He said that he would, and handed me his business card.
The next day I typed his name and
address onto a label. His name was Jim, so I thought that I would sign the book
to personalize it. It would say "To Jim, with best wishes. Yours,
Ray." Then I would put my personal email address under that (something I
rarely give out), in case he wanted to talk further about the possibility of
doing a television program based on the book, something I had been praying
about.
I walked into our store, grabbed
a hard cover copy of the book off a pile. I then walked back to my office, sat
down, opened it at the title page. I was about to write "To Jim, with best
wishes. Yours, Ray" and then put my email address, when I saw something I
could hardly believe. There, written in my own hand-writing were the words
"To Jim, with best wishes. Yours, Ray." Underneath it was my personal
email address. It was exactly what I was about to write. It was very strange.
A moment later I realized what
had happened. Two weeks earlier I had sent three signed copies to Jim Carrey to
three different addresses, hoping that at least one would get to him. This
particular book had been returned by UPS, and had been mistakenly put back into
the store. That was the copy I had picked up.
I thought that perhaps this was
God's way of letting me know that He was leading me. It was encouraging, but
before I entered into anything with Hollywood, I wanted to know that I really
did have God's leading. So I sent the book though the post office. If he
actually received it, it would be an obvious miracle.