First story

It didn't make much sense to Paul Miller of Parlin, New Jersey. The owner of a restaurant magazine, he had been at a business lunch with a man named Ron Kyle of Medford Lakes, but very little business had been discussed. Miller was confused -- and disturbed. As they parted, Kyle asked what seemed like a bizarre question. "Have you ever heard of Maria Esperanza?" he asked -- explaining that she was a "very interesting woman" whose apparitions (at a place called Betania, in Venezuela) had been approved by the Church -- and that Miller needed to meet her. As Miller recounts, Kyle may even have said that Maria, a world-renowned mystic, wanted to meet Miller when she came to the U.S. in about a month -- even though the magazine publisher had never heard of her.

Miller was "very shocked." They hadn't been speaking about religion. It was supposed to be a business lunch. He told his partner, Kurt Peters, a non-practicing Methodist, about it, and Peters, no friend of Catholicism, laughed. A month went by and Kyle called, announcing to Miller, himself a Sunday Catholic, "that Maria's here and she would like to meet you Thursday."

This was during the summer of 1997. Thursday came and there was no call. Miller thought Kyle was "completely nuts." But when the Medford Lakes man finally did call, he explained that Maria had not been feeling well -- in fact had had to visit the hospital -- and now also had to go to Rome but wanted to meet Miller, whom she should have had no way of knowing, when she returned to the U.S.

About ten days later, on the day Miller's magazine was set to go to press -- the busiest day of the month -- Ron called and said that Esperanza, widely regarded as one of the greatest mystics since Padre Pio, wanted to meet Miller at noon. Miller had a quick response: he was too busy!

Yet somehow the impulse struck his partner Kurt, an agnostic who thought it all amusing, to make the drive. Maria was staying at a hotel in Short Hills.

When they got there, they had to wait for forty minutes.

But then it all started.

"We went to the dining room and sat at a triangular table," Miller told Spirit Daily. "I didn't know anything about her. So I asked about her life." 

Maria began telling Miller about her childhood, including the account of her first apparition (at age 5 of St. Therese the Little Flower). After a while, Miller indicated that he wouldn't have time to hear the entire story. He was too busy. He had figured it would just be a forty-minute meeting. But she was still speaking. Miller indicated that he was ready to go. "With that Maria stood up at the table, looked at me, and said, 'Oh, no, we have a lot to talk about,' and she just walked away and left the table. We all looked at each other."

When Maria returned, she sat down, addressed Kurt for a moment (laughing that he was "very smart, but very young,"), then turned to Miller, her eyes filling with tears. "She looked at me and said, 'Today is a blessed day in your life. If you hadn't come here today, you would have died today.' I was surprised by that, to say the least, and then she looked at me and said, 'You know, you have been experiencing tremendous stress,' and she started to describe all these physical symptoms that I had been experiencing -- and it was true. My own father had a heart attack in his forties and I lost five uncles and aunts before fifty of heart attacks on both sides of the family. She had described exactly the symptoms I had been experiencing, and she said, 'I'm going to relieve you of that stress right now,' and she took her hand, extended her hand out with her palm toward me and her fingers raised, and she moved it across her body from left to right, almost like she was waving."

Miller felt nothing but was now intrigued by all she had told him. "Maria looked at me and started to stare at me and sort of stared above me and said 'I see this person standing behind you, this man, and he has white hair and long arms.' As she's talking about this person, she's taking on the body language of this person, mimicking it, and I realized that she was talking about my father (who had been dead for four years). There was even a point at which her son-in-law Carlos [who acts as her interpreter] said, 'St. Joseph,' and Maria corrected him in Spanish and said, 'No, not 'saint.' Well, my father's name was Joseph.

"I didn't say it was my father but just about that same time, at that moment, I happened to turn my head to see my partner Kurt, and his jaw had dropped down to his chest and his lips were quivering, and he was crying. He said to me, 'Paul, I see Joe.' He was petrified. He saw my father standing behind me."

Now Paul, Kurt, and everyone else were paying very close attention. Maria asked Miller if he prayed to the Sacred Heart, and strongly advised this. Later, when Paul was recounting the day to his mother, his mother literally jumped off the couch. "She said, 'Do you remember when you were a young boy, growing up, we used to have a picture of the Sacred Heart in our hallway coming into the house?'" he recounts. "She told me that after my father died she felt uncomfortable about putting it up in our house when she moved in with us because we didn't have religious things in our home, and so it was in storage in a box in the basement for four years but she said, 'Guess where it is now? It's up on my bed. I decided today to put it up!' She was shocked by this mention of the Sacred Heart. In fact my father had pledged our family to the Sacred Heart in 1960."

Maria had also described an older woman who was dragging her leg, and in fact that day Miler's mother had been to the doctor for a sciatic nerve!

Miller himself had a bum leg -- injured during an Army stint in 1971 -- and during the lunch, Maria had told Paul he had a leg problem even though she couldn't see his leg and even though he doesn't show any overt signs of the problem, which caused him excruciating pain each morning for thirty years. "Every day it felt like someone stabbed my leg with ice picks," recalls the businessman. "She said, 'I'm going to heal you right now.' With that, she hit the table with both her hands, actually hit the table, stood up, and said, 'Now stand up.' I stood up and she said, 'You're healed.'

"I didn't feel anything, I didn't see anything, I didn't hear anything, so I had no way of knowing -- I didn't have any pain at that time anyway -- so I sat back down."

For thirty years he hadn't been able to stand for more than 15 minutes without terrible pain, but in fact he was healed that day. It was the end of a decades-long affliction -- a great daily trial. There was no mistaking the supernaturality of it -- nor the touch of heaven. 

"In looking at Maria's eyes, I sensed the presence of the Blessed Mother," says Miller, who then went to see Maria when she was appearing in Lowell, Massachusetts.

It was there, in Lowell, that the really incredible event occurred -- which we will take a look at tomorrow.

Second story

When we left off, we were explaining the remarkable story of a New Jersey businessman, Paul Miller, who out of the blue was asked if he wanted to meet famed Venezuelan mystic Maria Esperanza and who ended up being healed by the famous Catholic seer  (See previous story about Miller) Despite his initial reluctance to meet with Maria -- whom he had not even heard about -- Miller had lunch with her and her family and at that first meeting she healed Miller of an injury that had caused him excruciating pain for thirty years. It just vanished. He was also given information by Maria that she could not possibly have known about.

That was striking enough -- enough to make a believer out of Miller (as well as his partner, Kurt Peters, who as an agnostic had been intensely skeptical). But the story grew even more astonishing. A short time later, when Miller went to see Maria at an event in Lowell, Massachusetts. Suddenly, something began to come over the publisher. "At this point I had been healed, and my mother [who suffered severe sciatica] was healed, and on top of that I started praying for some people to the Sacred Heart.

"And there had been some miraculous things happening. 

"My head was spinning. I was saying, 'How could this be?' It was so overwhelming and so unexpected. That night we went to Mass with Maria and then went back to her room. The next day they had a service and at the end they had a benediction that lasted two hours. All during the benediction I knelt on the floor and all during the benediction I got tremendous pains in my hands and feet -- I mean incredible pains. 

"But at the same time, I felt this unbelievable elation."

Later, at a Holiday Inn, where Paul was staying with his wife, the businessman was lying face down on the bed with his head turned to the left toward the clock just before four a.m., "when all of a sudden there was this swing noise -- wind with a ring -- and I got struck in the chest, and it literally lifted me up in the bed. It was so hard it was like getting hit by a truck. It was incredibly painful, and I thought I was dying of a heart attack.

"But as soon as it struck, this energy force of some kind exploded into my body, almost like, if you can imagine, an adrenalin rush, times a thousand. It just exploded through my body and literally coursed through until it hit my extremities -- my feet and fingers. 

"As soon as it felt like it was leaving through my fingers and toes, I went into a vision, and my vision was of the night before at the benediction. I was literally over the room where Maria was sitting, and where my wife and I were sitting, and I could see everyone in the room -- including myself. 

"As soon as I got oriented as to where I was, all of a sudden this very violent force picked me up under the arms, like you're lifted as a child, and I got pushed up really fast, almost like a jet, and started to go up. I actually saw the room going away from me.

"I looked up and saw this extremely bright light and I was hurtling toward this bright Light and actually went into it. 

"I went into it and there was this indescribable warmth that came over me. It was nearly as if someone took a pitcher of warm oil or something and put it over me. It started at the top of my head and just went through my entire body. It was indescribable, the feeling.

"At this point somehow I became aware that I was in God's Presence, and I said something that I never say, because this isn't in my normal vocabulary. I just said, 'Thank you, Jesus' -- and as soon as I said it, I hit the bed and my eyes opened and it was like a couple minutes after four. 

This is Paul Miller's claim. As per usual, it is reported for your prayerful consideration. Afterward, feeling tremendously drained, he lay in the bathtub trying to comprehend the events that were changing his life -- recalling what Carlos [Maria's son-in-law and interpreter] had said, "that the Lord would come."

"And I started to weep," says Paul, "like rivers. It wasn't an emotional cry, but this stream of tears started to pour out of my eyes. I wept from then until twenty minutes to eight --, almost four hours."

When the businessman went down for breakfast, he told two friends about it, and related it to what had happened to his namesake, St. Paul, when he was struck by a light. 

The way the force had knocked Miller first up above the bed (literally) and then back down still causes him astonishment. 

"It had physically lifted me into the air, and then I had gone into the vision," claims Miller -- a sober businessman who also produces a restaurant show in New York City. 

When he next ran into Carlos, he told the interpreter that he had to speak with Maria immediately. It was October 12. When Paul saw Maria after lunch, the mystic was chuckling and directed him to sit next to her. "Okay, my son," she said, "tell me, what is it?" 

Miller recounted to Maria what had happened, although he forgot to mention the swing noise. "She didn't even let me get through a third of the story and she said, 'Congratulations, my son, you have received the intimate touch of Christ and your soul has been sealed for all of eternity as an apostle. You are now a permanent part of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. From this moment on, the Archangel Raphael will be your special guardian angel. But wait until October 12."

Maria didn't realize it already was October 12.

When her interpreter told her, Epseranza -- who is associated with the Church-approved apparition site of Betania -- threw up her hands and told Miller, "Paul, on October 12, 1954, I stood with a group of my friends when all of a sudden a light appeared and -- swing! -- I was knocked to the ground. I was hit in the chest and knocked to the ground. My soul was sealed that day as a mother of souls.'"

When she made that swing noise, everyone at the table left their chairs, says Miller -- "because they knew I hadn't described it to her. Then she said that on October 7, 1954, the Blessed Mother appeared to her and had told her to be in isolation because on that day her soul would be 'sealed.' And she said to me, 'It was so difficult that I had to stay in bed for two days.'" Maria added that her whole life changed.

Now, half a century later, so was Miller's. He began a healing ministry, with what he says have been remarkable results -- asserting that even cancers have disappeared. He ministers along with a well-known healing priest from Boston named Father Edward McDonough. "I've seen everything," he told Spirit Daily. "It's unbelievable!"

As for his agnostic and anti-Catholic partner, Kurt Peters: he is now a very practicing Catholic.

Paul Miller's special prayer: "Lord You said ask and you will receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and the door will be opened to you. And so I bring the petitions of those entrusted to my prayer to the most Sacred Heart, and I ask that You heal them in body, mind, and soul according to Your Will. I ask You to be moved and as You were moved by the tears of Martha and Mary for their beloved brother Lazarus, as You were moved by Your mother's request at the marriage ceremony at Cana, as You were moved by the faith of the woman who believed she would be healed by touching the tassel of Your clothing. I thank You for the many times You have interceded on our behalf, and I look forward to Your coming for the conversion of souls."

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