Impossible Odds: What happened in Brussels in 1993 (a personal account)

This is a story that for whatever reason, I haven't shared on this blog before.  Maybe it's because it's so long and many people might not have the time to read it all?  But it's a good story, I think.  One that might have many marveling at the serendipitous nature of the universe.  Personally, I believe this is a "God thing".  The chances of this happening as they did cannot be calculated.  And yet the elements fell precisely into place, more beautifully than anything that a person could probably come up with on their own.

I shared this story earlier a few days ago on a friend's Facebook post, which was about her daughter happening to run into a former next-door neighbor at the Vatican.   This story is right up there with that.  So here it is.  Enjoy!

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It was the summer of 1993.  July 5th to be exact.  When I was 19 I spent a few weeks visiting a dear friend in Belgium.  Bennie was in med school at the time so one day while she was in class, I was running loose on the streets of Brussels.  We were going to meet up that afternoon to catch a movie.

It was about noon, and I was leaving the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, when these three young people - they couldn't have been out of high school - approached me and tried saying something in French.  All I could do was say "sorry folks but I know very little French, I'm from America."

That got their attention.  It turned out that they were from Russia, from Moscow actually.  And they knew English fairly well.  It was two guys and a young lady.  They told me that they were with a group that was traveling around western Europe, now that Russians could do that sort of thing.

They asked me if I knew where the big square, Grand Place, was.  I told them that I knew exactly where it was and that I could take them right there.  So that's where we headed to.  And we were talking, sharing where we each were from.  And I said that I came from North Carolina.

This excited one of the two guys.  He said he had heard of North Carolina.  He had met some people from North Carolina, even.  They had come to his school a year and a half earlier.  He even had their picture with him.

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a Russian Bible.  He said he carried it everywhere with him.  And in the Bible he had a photo of American young people who were missionaries who came to his school.

"This one, she came from North Carolina," he said, pointing to a blond girl of about 16 years old.  "Her name is Christy.  When you go back to North Carolina, say hello to her from me!"

I told him that North Carolina was a fairly large state.  But "I'll tell her if I ever see her."

We were in Grand Place while he was telling me about the girl from North Carolina.  They asked if I knew any place there to eat.  I suggested a pizza restaurant that I had seen a few days earlier.  That's where we went to, and this was the very first time that any of these kids had a chance to eat real pizza.  I bought a large one for all of us, my treat.  It was just so much fun meeting these young people about my age from Russia, and talking with them over pizza.  It was a great experience 🙂 

We were there for an hour and then it was getting to be time for me to go meet Bennie.  I said goodbye to the Russian kids and the guy who asked me to say hello to this Christy person showed me her picture again.  I told him that I'd do my best to find her.

I spent another week in Belgium and Bennie and me had a blast!  We were in Paris for two days and that was an amazing time.  And then sadly we had to say goodbye and I flew back home and spent the next week and a half getting over jet lag (laughing aloud).

It was a long shot, but I decided to try to find Christy from North Carolina.  I spent the next two years leading up to my transfer to Elon looking for her.  And then when the Internet came about I tried finding her through that.  So for five or so years on and off I was looking for this person.  Because I'd promised some Russian kid in Brussels that I would.  And I kept coming up empty.  I'd wondered if the Russian guy had the right location when he told me where Christy was from.

So eventually I gave up on looking for her.

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Now the story jumps to the fall of 2003, a little over ten years after meeting the Russian students...

My wife and I had been visiting churches around where we lived, looking for a place of regular worship.  I came across one that the kids there were washing cars to raise money for a mission trip.  They seemed like a good bunch so we visited their church during Sunday service.  And my wife and I decided we liked the people there a lot and so we made it our place of worship.

The pastor had told me that the church didn't have a website but they had wanted one.  I thought it would be a neat project, and I told him that I'd be glad to help them get that going.  So we set about designing a church website.

I was in the pastor's office one evening, he had stepped outside to do something.  And I found myself looking at the pictures he had on a bookshelf.  Obviously of his family.  There was his wife, and two young men who were obviously his sons.  And there was a young woman who was apparently his daughter.

Something about her photo kept making me want to look at her.  She seemed familiar.  Like I knew her from some place.

Wait a sec...

She reminded me of the girl in the photo in the Russian kid's Bible ten years ago in Brussels, Belgium.

I took a long hard look at his daughter's photo on the wall.  And it did indeed look like the girl in the Russian kid's photo.

No.  That wasn't possible.  That was ABSOLUTELY impossible.

When the pastor returned, I told him that I had been admiring his family photos.  And he talked a little about them.  His wife, their two sons, their daughter...

"This sounds weird but I can't help but think that I've seen your daughter before."

I asked the pastor what her name was.

He replied that her name was Christy.

I cannot begin to describe the thoughts that were running through my head when he told me that.

I told the pastor that I wasn't sure if she was the person I had in mind.  I asked him where had she been, maybe our paths had crossed some other way, somehow.

He started telling me that his children had all done mission work.

"Where has Christy been?"

He told me that among other places she had visited Russia for two weeks in the fall of 1991.

My jaw would have hit the floor, had it not been hinged to my skull.

I almost fainted with disbelief.  When I regained my composure I told him the story, about the Russian teenager in Brussels ten years earlier asking me to tell Christy hi when I got back to North Carolina.

"Do you have any pictures of her from about that time?" I asked him.  He said that he did at his house and that I could follow him over there.

We got to his house.  And right up on the wall going up the stairs there was a framed photo of his daughter... wearing the same outfit as the girl in the picture I had seen in Brussels.

All along, the person I had been asked to look for ten years earlier, by a student from Moscow on the streets of Brussels, had been less than fifteen miles from where I'd grown up.

And we had wound up at the church where her father was the pastor.

Some time later, I asked a mathematical genius friend of mine about what were the odds of all of that happening as they did.  She replied that with so many factors to consider, the odds were incalculable.  It simply should not have happened like that, at all.

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A few weeks later after making that discovery, I got to meet Christy.  And at long last I told her "hello" from the Russian kid.  I'm Facebook friends with she and her husband (they share an account).  They've been blessed with a beautiful family and recently became grandparents.

For as long as I live, how I came to know about her and our eventually meeting each other will never stop blowing my mind.  It's a mathematical miracle.  And maybe more than that.  For those of us who believe in God, it really does come across as something that only He could have let come about.

Not the strangest thing to ever happen to me, but it's up there.

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Weird items in the news: honey additive, expanding bread, and a World War I shell lodged in a man's buttocks

Lots of crazy stuff in the news this past week.  I've been sharing them with friends on Facebook, where they have engendered no small amount of mirth and merriment.  So I thought I'd post about them here too!

First up is this recall notice about a brand of honey that is being pulled off the shelves because somehow, somewhere along the manufacturing process, an active ingredient in erectile dysfunction medication made it into the finished product.

Next up is a story from Colorado about a man who is suing Walmart after claiming to be severely injured.  The man apparently bought raw bake-to-eat sourdough bread without first warming it up in an oven.  The bread expanded inside his stomach and allegedly brought on immense pain and suffering.

I saw that in an old episode of Emergency! awhile back.  Johnny and Roy got called to help a guy who ate unbaked bread dough and he had to get taken to Rampart.  So stupidity about this kind of thing goes back a fair bit. It seems.

And finally there comes this item from France, where a man was taken to the hospital, no doubt in severe pain.  That's where doctors found an eight-inch long unexploded artillery shell from World War I lodged in his rectum.

(Brings entirely new meaning to "fire in the hole!" does it not?)

I shared that last story with a friend who is a physician in Belgium.  She said that's it's hard to believe: the kinds of objects that people come in that are shoved up their, errr... rear.  Some people have even died from it.

What fascinated me most about that story though is that it was a live round from World War I.  That was over a hundred years ago.  Over the years there have been quite a few stories about still-live shells from that conflict being found.  So much of France and Belgium came under artillery fire during the Great War that it's possible there will still be undetonated shells found for the next one hundred years.

Maybe I should make "news of the weird" a regular feature on this blog.  What do y'all think?

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This is freaking my friends out on Facebook

In the past few days there's been something of a challenge on Facebook: post a picture of yourself at age 17 along with a photo of what you look like now.  It just so happened that I had my high school senior pic in storage a short distance away from where I was sitting.  Juxtaposed with a modern photo and it's startling a number of people.

At left is me in August of 1991.  At right is a fairly recent pic of me from late 2023.

Not that much change at all!  Well, I try to live healthy.  I don't smoke and I only drink once a year, when I honor Dad's memory with his favorite wine.  I exercise moderately.  I try to maintain a cheerful disposition.  Wherever I go I like to make people smile, and maybe there's something to that too.  I do feel older though.  I feel mature, it's hard not to feel that after life has thrown so much at you.  But I've done my best to keep a childlike spark alive, too.

I guess I should be thankful.  I'm still alive, despite everything that has happened along the way.  A lot of people don't get to come so far.  Things could be much better in my life but I have reasons to be grateful, too.

But if I still look like this at age seventy, that's going to be downright spooky.

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Watch it now: the legendary CNN "end of the world" video

One of the things I've always wanted to do with this blog is post interesting stuff.  Or at least those things that are intriguing to me.  Admittedly, that has slacked off a lot in the past several months.  Between writing my book (a project that devoured most of 2014) and then Dad's passing a month and a half ago, this hasn't  been the best of times to even look for neat/odd material, much less post about it.  Maybe I can do better about that in the coming year.

And fortunately good friend Scott Kelly has come to the rescue with something to kick it off with:

Cue James Earl Jones voiceover: "THIS... was CNN."

I first heard weird stories about "the CNN doomsday tape" around the time of the Gulf War in 1991.  Allegedly, CNN founder Ted Turner has made a video that would be the very last thing that his cable news network would broadcast before the end of the world engulfed all of mankind in hellfire, brimstone, plague or zombie apocalypse.  The plan was that when the very last CNN employee was left alive in the building, the "play" button would be hit and this would be the final thing that whatever viewers were left would witness on CNN.

Turns out it's not so much a legend.  And CNN employees have known about it for years.  However, this is the first time that the video itself has found its way into public purview.

Jalopnik has a great write-up about Ted Turner's end-times CNN tape, which is still within the network's video archive listed as "TURNER DOOMSDAY VIDEO" under strictest orders that it not be broadcast "till end of the world confirmed".  Included in the article is the video itself: of a military band playing "Nearer My God To Thee".

In a really odd way it reminds me of the night of 9/11.  My best friend was working in the CNN Building in Atlanta at the time, and all evening we were talking back and forth on AOL Instant Messenger.  It was really something to be hearing directly from the bowels of what was almost certainly the most-watched news network in the world at that moment.  I've still got the log of that IM session somewhere.

I once heard that Orson Welles had recorded a radio broadcast meant for the end of the world.  But I haven't been able to find anything about that.  Perhaps some reader of this blog will be able to enlighten me more about that.

Anyway, it's a good article.  Well worth reading if you're into matters of technological history.  Which is curious in this matter in that the video is still in 4:3 aspect ratio at standard definition, so if you don't have a high-def set you can still watch CNN cover Armageddon.

EDIT 6:47 p.m. EST:   I've watched this video a few more times and the more I think about it, the less funny it seems.

Consider: this tape was made in 1981.  Kids today don't realize how SCARY things were back then, at the height of the Cold War and the fear that any moment there would be nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviets.  1983 seems especially vivid: when the Russians shot down the South Korean airliner and then not long after when the TV movie The Day After aired.  The policy of mutually-assured destruction meant that both sides understood that an attack by one superpower would mean the destruction of each nation and with that it would almost certainly be the end of all civilization, everywhere.

We lived.  We laughed.  We had babies.  But above it all there was a lingering fear that somehow or another, The Button would be pressed by one side or the other and the biblical end times would be upon us just like that.  I was at a Christian school at the time and with few exceptions there was an air of paranoia among the faculty: as if it had to be drilled into our heads that Russia was the tool of Satan eagerly waiting to unleash an unholy salvo against America so we'd better "get right" with God before it was too late.

That was years before I came to understand that we enter into a relationship with God because we want to, not because we are forced into it by others.  But I digress...

So yeah: we went about our lives.  All the while knowing that nuclear war could erupt and that would be the end of everything.

Bearing that in mind, I could easily envision a scenario where before the bombs hit, a CNN employee might actually get confirmation that the nukes were inbound and that the network really was "signing off" for good.

So that said, this really is a fascinating and legitimate artifact of the 1980s.

EDIT 7:07 p.m. EST:  Maybe I should do something like that for this blog.  Like, have a YouTube video embedded in a post ready to be deployed for when the nukes fall or the undead overwhelm us all.  Or at least a "final post" that friends will unload upon my demise.  What do y'all think?

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