roysan78 wrote:If that did happen it would have been huge news..I have never heard about it..
The best thing I can describe life is like this
The universe has been here billions of years. You have been dead for billions of years. All of a sudden, mom and dad have intercourse and here you are. You live for 70 years or so, then die.
Basically, life is a episode of nothingness, then you [live] for some 70 years, then you die.
Basically, it's like a empty room that's been there billions of years. All of a sudden, something appears. That something lives for 70 years, then dies out. All remains is that emptyness that has always been.
So you've made up your mind then? Based only on the very basics of what can be seen?
Here is another story of answered prayer, a very manly one. 
The one I posted earlier was the first entry from the book it is in; this is the last. It's a little long, but it is very well written - like a story. So I decided to include the whole thing.
MY ONLY PRAYER
by Lee Maynard (in
True Stories of Answered Prayer by Mike Nappa, Tyndale House 1999, pp 177-182).
We are hunkered down at the base of a rock overhang, the summit far above us, watching the rain fall softly. We are tired from climbing and running from the rain. My eleven-year-old grandson, Tristan, is with me. He knows about Martian landings and cyberspace, and just when you think that's all he is—an interesting child of a technological age—he names Greek gods and tells how the citizens prayed to them.
“Maybe we should pray for a way out of here,” I say, watching the rain grow heavier. “Does prayer really work?” he asks. “Would it really get us out of here?” I think carefully about what to say next . . . for I am not a prayerful man.
I have had my share of hurts and pains in the wilderness. The stings of scorpions. The snapping of bones. Dehydration so severe my eyes stung. But I never prayed over any of that. I always thought that if I put myself into those places, it was up to me to get out. God probably wasn't interested.
Prayer, I have always thought, was the thing you saved for last. But every time I got to the last, there was no time for praying. And when it was over, all I could do was wonder that I was still alive. And so I never prayed. Except once.
It was 1978. In the early hours, when the tops of trees were still lost in darkness, I parked my truck and stepped into New Mexico's Gila Wilderness. My plan was to hike to 20 miles in, then join up with a group of nine Outward Bound School students and their instructors, a “patrol.” I was the school director, and I was worried about this patrol: three New England preppies, a college freshman, three high school graduates from Dallas, and two South Chicago street kids who had been sentenced to Outward Bound in lieu of jail.
I looked forward to hiking in the Gila. Even after half a lifetime spent outdoors, I couldn't seem to see it enough. But it was midsummer, and the sun's heat poured down relentlessly. At midday I stopped, drank some water, and for the first time noticed the heat in my boots. The boots were not new. I had worn them for some weeks and thought they were ready for the Gila. I was wrong. I tried everything for relief: stopped and aired my feet, put on extra socks, quickened my pace, slowed my pace, tightened the laces, applied moleskin. Nothing worked.
I reached camp in the middle of the evening meal, took off my boots and socks, and padded around on the soft forest floor. I inspected my feet and counted eleven blisters, near blisters, and hot spots. Still, I told no one about my problem.
We sat and talked for hours. After two weeks in the wilderness, only one student, a New Englander, seemed disenchanted with the course. He had tried to quit but had been talked out of it by the staff. In the morning, the New Englander was gone. He had left hours before, thrashing back down the trail I'd come in on. We couldn't just let him go into the unforgiving wilderness. Since I was the extra man, I put on the devil boots and went after him.
I soon realized I wasn't just limping anymore—I was walking as though barefoot on hot glass. As I shuffled and stumbled, I tried to keep my mind above my ankles. Again, nothing worked. A new sound sucked its way into my consciousness, and I realized it was coming from my boots. I sat on a fallen tree, held my feet out in front of me, and looked at the crimson oozing from the eyelets. If I took the boots off, I would never get them on again.
Eventually the trail came out of the brush and straight into the Gila River, flowing down from the high country through shaded canyons. By the time it got to me, this narrow, shallow river was still icy, and I couldn't wait to feel it against my baking feet. But when the water poured into my boots, the burning sensation was replaced with a thousand stabs that seemed to puncture every blister. My scream cut through the canyon, and I went face forward into the water. Then I got up and staggered across the river.
Since there was no rational solution to my problem, my mind began to create irrational ones. The answer, obviously, was . . . a horse. If I just had a horse, my feet would no longer be a problem, and I could catch the New Englander. Like King Richard III, I began to implore, “Give me another horse! Have mercy!” What was the next word? Oh yes. “Jesu.”
I knew I had only another hundred paces or so in me, and then I would stop, sit, and wait. I'd probably see no one for days. The sun was low against my back, and my shadow reached far down the stony trail. I would never get to the end of my shadow. And then I stopped. The right shoulder of my shadow moved, a bulging darkness down on the trail. A huge mass, motionless now, blocked most of the low sun, an elongated head bobbing up in attention to my presence.
It was a horse. A ghost born of pain.
God, I thought,
the mind is an amazing thing. It was a beautiful ghost, but I would have to make it go away. So I confronted it directly, dragging myself right up to the horse and grabbing its halter. It was a real horse.
The animal had a halter and a lead robe but no saddle. Something was going on here that I didn't understand, but I was not going to question it. I gathered up the lead rope and struggled onto the horse's back. “A horse, a horse,” I mumbled as it calmly carried me down the trail and into the falling darkness. “Jesu.”
The horse walked through the night and did not stop until we got to the trail head, where I found the New Englander sitting on the bumper of my truck. I took off the hated boots, bandaged my feet, and hobbled the horse in a patch of grass. The New Englander and I slept nearby. A first light two wranglers showed up looking for the horse. They said it had never wandered off before and didn't know why it did this time. They said the horse's name was King.
The rain turns to sleet, and I think maybe Tristan and I will have to sleep out the storm on a mountain where there are no horses. He leans against me, and he is smiling. “Did you really pray?” he asks. “For the horse?” “Well . . . I was a little out of it. Mumbling, I'm not sure anything I said would qualify as a prayer.” “I think you did pray,” he says. “And you got what you prayed for, and it scared you.” As usual, he's gotten to the heart of the matter.
The sleet disappears, and a thick mist suffuses the mountain. But behind the mist is a bright light, glowing first silver, and then gold. “I did, didn't I?” I admit. “I
did pray.” We leave the overhang and start down the mountain, the air thick with the nectar of after-storm. It is one of the best days of my life. Prayer still mystifies me. Maybe I shouldn't save it for last.
