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Miracles, Angels & Afterlife
Signposts to Heaven
By Peter Shockey, Stowe D. Shockey OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2013 Peter Shockey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-6553-8
CHAPTER 1
A Father's Forgiveness
I picked up Dick Musielak at the Nashville airport on a Wednesday evening around 7:30 p.m.. He had flown in from Houston to be interviewed for the film we were making for TLC (The Learning Channel) on the subject of modern-day miracles. We had dinner that evening in a nice Italian restaurant. I traditionally like to share a meal with people whose stories we will be filming so that we can get to know each other. This allows them to get beyond the first blush of telling what are often some very personal details and gives me a chance to connect with them, eye to eye.
I had first read about Dick's experience in Joan Wester Anderson's book Where Miracles Happen, and by the time I met him we had already talked on the phone at length. Still, as we waited for dinner, breathing in the aroma of roast garlic and oregano, I asked Dick if he would go over his story one more time to prepare for our filming the next day.
The Beloved Son
It had been a balmy Friday night in Houston, Texas, when twenty-three-year-old Paul Musielak swung into a local convenience store on his way home from a friend's house. He parked in his usual spot and had no sooner gotten out of his car and turned around when– wham! From out of nowhere he was broadsided across the head with a blunt object. Repeated bursts of pain to the face and head blurred the image of the two thugs who brutally pummeled him into the pavement. Paul's bloody body was left lying in the parking lot – the unfortunate victim of a random attack.
Upon news of his son's attack, Dick Musielak rushed to the hospital to be at his side. As he entered the room and caught sight of Paul, Dick was stopped cold in his tracks.
"I couldn't believe what I saw," Dick recalls. "Paul's eyes were bleeding ... They were so swollen shut and out of proportion that he looked like some strange creature – literally out to here." Dick put a fist to each of his eyes to demonstrate the appalling swelling he had witnessed. "And blood all over his face," he continued. "Paul looked like a piece of raw meat that had just been slaughtered ... and no one knew yet if his vision would be permanently damaged." He had multiple contusions on his face. Along with a fractured nose and orbital bone, X rays also showed a skull fracture. Doctors suspected that Paul may also have suffered brain damage.
Because Paul had received a trauma to the head he was not allowed any pain medication even though he was still conscious. Dick stood by helplessly, watching his precious son suffer in excruciating pain. As endless moments slowly ticked by, one question rolled over and over in his mind: Who would do this to my boy? Neither the police nor Paul could offer any clues as to why he had been attacked.
In a daze, Dick left the hospital and headed for home. As he drove, a smoldering anger ignited and began to burn within him. He became obsessed with finding the men who had hurt his son. Not only was he going to catch them, Dick was going to make them pay for the pain they had caused. He planned carefully how he would find them and break their kneecaps before turning them over to authorities.
He awoke early Saturday morning, exhausted after a restless night, but more than ready to begin his search for the two hoodlums. He tacked up wanted posters in the neighborhood where the crime had occurred. He talked to people on the street, offering rewards for information leading to the two men's capture. Dick did everything he could think of. But by day's end he still had nothing. Nothing except an all-consuming desire for revenge. This was further heightened by a visit to the hospital to see Paul that afternoon. The doctors reported there had been no improvement in his condition.
Sunday morning found Dick more determined than ever to catch those men. He explains, "I went to church with a baseball bat in my car."
He paid little attention to the sermon. Instead, his mind wandered throughout the service, and he visualized what he would like to do to these horrible thugs.
At some point, though, the minister's powerful words slowly began to seep in. Dick recalls, "Wouldn't you know it, the sermon that day was on forgiveness!"
The minister had been quoting Jesus' teachings, "Forgive your enemies and pray for those who mistreat you." Dick braced himself, holding firmly to his anger and almost said out loud, "Not today, Lord."
But try as he might, Dick could not deny the message that was speaking directly to his heart. The words seemed to be aimed especially at him that morning, "–And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in Heaven may forgive you of your sins." Dick stopped for a moment. He closed his eyes. And as he did, the realization came that he could no longer pursue his vindictive behavior toward those men. He had to forgive them. Somewhere deep inside he knew that he could not ask God for his son's healing if he held bitterness toward the attackers.
And so he began to silently pray, "Oh, God, help me. Help me to forgive those people, whoever they are. Please take these awful feelings from my heart." ... Alone in his pew, Dick Musielak sensed a wave of peace overcome him. And there was a tangible shift in his emotional state. Something in his heart was breaking loose, as if a curse had been lifted. And as he forgave the misguided men, tears of compassion welled up as he focused on new prayers for his son. He wept for his son, for the attackers, and at the Lord's ability to forgive.
After church Dick drove to the hospital to visit with Paul. As he exited the elevator, one of the nurses spotted him and said, "Mr. Musielak, it's your son, we don't know how to explain it ..." Fearing something awful had happened, Dick immediately raced past her and down the hall to Paul's room. He was totally unprepared for the scene that awaited him as he entered.
There was Paul, sitting up in bed! Dick recollects, "The swelling had gone down and he had opened his eyes. That, in and of itself was a miracle." His eyes were only slightly bloodshot and there were no scars, scabs, or bruising. Nothing remained to indicate that he had been severely beaten just two days earlier. New X rays showed no sign of a fracture.
Astonished, he asked, "How can this be?"
No one in the hospital had an answer for him. The doctors just shook their heads in amazement.
On Monday Dick and his wife went back to the hospital to check the doctor's exit report for Paul. There it was in black and white. On Saturday's X-ray was the evidence of a fractured skull and brain damage. On Monday there was no trace of any fracture at all. Whereas only two days earlier Paul had been treated for deep lacerations and was given the prognosis of certain disfigurement and possibly permanent blindness, he left the hospital as free of blemish as if nothing had ever happened.
As I paid our check and prepared to take Dick to his hotel, I puzzled over his amazing story. I asked myself, "What kind of power had been released by the act of forgiveness in this miraculous healing?" And not only the healing of the son's physical injuries, but of the even deeper ill that had been brewing in the heart of the father? This was just one of many questions we would need to address in the film Stories of Miracles, which we were producing for The Learning Channel.
Over the next several months, I would hear many other amazing stories. Little did I know, at the time, that the miraculous memories told by so many people would be transporting me back to my own earliest recollections, and then to a time long before that ...
CHAPTER 2
A Personal Quest
I stood on the sidewalk at 7700 Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda, Maryland, looking up at the impressive high-rise offices of Discovery Communications Inc., home of The Learning Channel. As I gathered my thoughts for the meeting I was about to have with the VP of Programming, my memory shot back to thirty years earlier, when as a child I had eaten fried chicken at the Top's restaurant located on the very spot now occupied by Discovery. Although I had moved to Tennessee as a young adult and still live there, I had grown up in Bethesda and found it ironic that life would return me to visit the place where my journey had begun so long ago.
For me, Bethesda has always been a meeting place of sharp contrasts, where warmth and open-mindedness clashed with cold and stark materialism. That perception began almost as early as I could remember.
Actually, my first conscious memories go back to my fifth year of life, happily swimming in the sunshine of 1960s Los Angeles, a superficial lifestyle right out of TV commercials of the day. Swimming pools and A-bomb shelters. The Twilight Zone and The Flintstones. Four years earlier, when I was one year old, my parents' romantic spirit had catapulted them out of New York City in search of a less chilly emotional climate in which to raise a family. Taking the scenic route, we lived in an adobe house in Santa Fe for a year, a downtown flat in San Francisco for a couple of years, and finally a new suburban rancher with a swimming pool in Glendora, outside of L.A. Dad had landed a great job at Ampex, which had just released a new product called videotape. Within another year a big merger resulted in a management sweep (which foreshadowed the corporate trends of the high-tech nineties) and we were instantly ejected from the great job, house, pool, and Leave-It-to-Beaver lifestyle with the speed of a channel switch.
Waking up on the poor side of town, in a tiny apartment in Santa Monica, I was immediately befriended-or rather taken in-by a tough boy who introduced me to stealing cigarettes from the sports bags of tennis players at the park, then smoking and gagging behind the bushes. I became as mean as necessary to fit in, once rubbing a sliced lemon onto the skinned knee of a younger neighbor girl, just to watch her cry. At seven years old, I was already headed for whatever the street life of a poor kid in L.A. might lead to. And then the channel switched again.
Dad was offered a job by a former coworker who was currently working at the IRS in Washington, D.C. The federal government position was just what our family – Dad, Mom, my sister, Christine, and I – needed in order to restart life in the security and safety of a nice old house in suburban Bethesda, Maryland. It turned out to be the long-range opportunity my father had hoped for, and he continued to be promoted until his comfortable retirement fifteen years later.
The move for me, however, was quite traumatic, and I didn't cope very well.
"Everything is so overgrown," was my first reaction to seeing the abundant trees and vegetation that had been so sparse in California. "And everyone seems so unfriendly."
It was a completely different climate, both physically and emotionally, and the East Coast chill that my parents had escaped by leaving New York had crept back into this season of our lives. I didn't fit in very well with the kids who had been hazed in this traditional, materialistic, and politically-minded school of thought. Children in this new place had learned at a very early age to be two-faced. One of my first neighborhood friends destroyed me one day during recess at Bethesda Elementary School by ridiculing me with obscenities in front of all the other children. I thought we had been best friends. In California I understood what a friend was, and I understood what it was to be mean. But I didn't understand the rules to these strange games – sarcasm, scoffing, "in-crowds" and social climbing – and I wanted no part of them. So I withdrew.
After school I would run home to avoid being taunted, and then sit in front of television eating buttered cinnamon toast to comfort myself. Between second and third grade I put on twenty-five pounds, which immediately gave the critics something more to tease me about. My parents were concerned by my isolation and urged me to join the neighborhood softball team, the Edgemoor Tigers. I have memories of tripping over myself during one of my few base runs, and skidding on my face to the jeers of my teammates. At the team Christmas party, someone announced that a special treat had been provided for me – a can of Metrical diet drink. My self-esteem was at an all-time low and I had no way to escape the hard reality that surrounded me.
I am now aware that I did what people often do when they are attacked and made to be fearful. I became that which I feared. I resorted to taunting my little sister, and we fought like we never had before. I am told that when Christine was born several years earlier in California, I had been very protective and loving toward her. But now I was treating her the way I was being treated by my peers. It must have been obvious to my parents what was happening to me, because my father said something one day that still echoes in my mind like a gong. He said, "I don't know what's gotten into you, son ... you used to be such a nice little guy to have around." To say I was frustrated is an understatement. I protested to him in the silence of my mind, "Well you never should have brought me here," and "Why can't we move back to where the people are nice and the pollen doesn't make me wheeze!" But of course we stayed, and I adapted in order to survive the storm of my developing psyche.
I discovered quite early that creative pursuits had their rewards. Instead of playing kickball with the boys, I would sit in the "tunnels" – concrete pipes fashioned into playground equipment – and would make sculptures out of the playground's muddy clay, to the great admiration of girls whose attention I couldn't get by playing sports.
My mother, an art teacher at a local private school, provided a safe haven for me to further develop my creative inclinations. She devoted our entire garage to set up an arts & crafts studio, open to all the neighborhood children, and I gained a reputation for being an experimenter in various optics, illusions, and gadgets, which gave me alternative ways to develop childhood self-esteem.
By seventh grade, I had regained control of my waistline by a sheer act of willpower and began exploring life's horizon for other things that I could do with my life. I went with a friend to see 2001: A Space Odyssey and was absolutely captivated by the visual effects and by the transcendental nature of the story (I have seen the film over twenty times in my lifetime, and probably a third of those viewings were during its initial release). I knew right then and there that I wanted to make films, and that an exciting future lay ahead of me.
As to religion, I can't say I had much exposure or for that matter even the slightest interest. I was told we were Presbyterians. I was also told we were Republicans. So, my only practical use for the information was as a conversation starter: "What religion are you?" and "Are you a Republican or a Democrat?" to which I still remember the mother of a new friend replying, "It doesn't matter what religion we are, and besides it isn't any of your business." So, with the exception of going to the Bethesda Presbyterian Church religiously, mainly on Christmas and Easter, there wasn't much education or indoctrination. I'm grateful to my parents for being honest enough to not be hypocritical about the subject, as it allowed me to pursue my own interests at my own pace without being turned off to the emptiness of religion without spiritual substance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Miracles, Angels & Afterlife by Peter Shockey, Stowe D. Shockey. Copyright © 2013 Peter Shockey. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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