Here is an anecdote—one of several in a theme, they say—about the actor Jim Caviezel during the filming of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ:
This was especially evident during the making of The Passion of the Christ, which was marked by a series of extraordinary and, for many, providential occurrences. One of the most remarkable events involved lightning striking (literally) actor Jim Caviezel – not once, but twice. During the filming of the Sermon on the Mount scene, Caviezel was struck directly in front of a plethora of onlookers who rushed over to provide medical assistance; a crew member was subsequently also hit. Caviezel later described the experience, saying he felt “light surrounding his body” before losing consciousness.
The coincidence is not only the strike during the obvious religious circumstances, but walking away from it unharmed. This is rare. Not unheard of: rare.
You may be as delighted as I was to discover our government keeps a list of people hit by lightning who weren’t kilt deed outright. Many of the situations were where you’d expect, on a beach or under a tree and the like. Curious to me were the list of injuries. A very few, like Caviezel, had none. Most others developed obvious pains, like headache, nausea, burns, seizures and similar.
But three people, coincidentally (our word of the day) who were struck while inside, or so it is reported, who after being stung claimed to have developed psychic abilities.
Coincidences become defined because of their seeming rarity. Take away the uncommonness of events and the magic is sucked out. You don’t see it as a coincidence to find another man walking down the sidewalk on a Monday morning as you head to work. You would call it a coincidence if the man turned out to be a boyhood chum you hadn’t seen in forty years.
Unlikeliness, too, is a seeming requirement for the miraculous; miracles are coincidences writ large. A cold clearing after five days is not credited to the divine. But a cancer disappearing a week after diagnosis would be.
The role of rarity is odd, though, because of passages like this: “And hospitality do not forget; for by this some, being not aware of it, have entertained angels.” Entertaining an angel would qualify, I think, as miraculous. You do not have to believe that passage to take away its import. It is your unawareness of who you entertained that strips out the feeling of amazement, yet the miracle remains. If you didn’t recognize your old friend on the sidewalk, the event still occurred, but no sensation of coincidence occurs because of your unawareness.
Coincidences and miracles become important to us only when incidents are bundles with a possible common divine or occult (hidden) cause. The rarity helps suggest the possibility of such causes, even if we eventually dismiss them.
Long-time readers might have seen this coming: since nothing has a probability, thus probability is always in the mind, any judgement of rarity or commonality is based on evidence assumed. What evidence you entertain, however it arrives from whatever sources, always in the end is picked by you. Which doesn’t mean what you pick is best, or all evidence true. Plus, recall that not all have the ability to form judgements of all things.
This is not just throat clearing. It is key. In considering any event, we are always seeking to explain it, and to explain it means to lay out its full cause and the conditions of those causes. It is only when we do not, or cannot, know a full cause that there is uncertainty. With all this in mind, let’s look at the cases before us.
First is nurse Thais (on the weather service list). Best to read each entry, but briefly: she was inside during a storm and saw lightning in a mirror as she attended a patient. A glow enveloped her; later watches stopped working well in her presence. Years later another storm gently raged outdoors and she felt “an odd sensation.” She claims to have uncovered a secret affair by psychic means.
Second is Blair. She was in the back of an apartment with the door open and lightning came inside and chased her to a back bedroom. She “was in a state of semi-consciousness.” After a week, “huge changes in me began. I started to ‘know’ so much, such as when I was being lied to, I could see who was a bad person and predict when things would happen.” She also claims depression and “terrible insomnia”.
Third is David, but we only have the claim of psychic abilities, because the link is broken.
Fourth is Caviezel, as above.
Now what you might see, in relating events like this, are calculations on being hit by lightning and surviving, modified by where standing and other circumstances. I mean “If you are on a golf course and a storm is brewing, there is an X% chance of being stung” sort of things. Useful enough in their way, though often overly vague (because nothing has a probability). In any case, these are the wrong calculations.
It’s all backwards.
What we want—and if you hear bells ringing as you read this sentence, I will be most proud—is not the chance of being struck here or there, but the probability of the Important Cause being true given one was struck. In our examples, the Important Cause is the force that causes development of curious abilities, as in the Weather Service examples, or the cause of a signal of religious importance in Caviezel’s case.
In other words, we want the chance that zapping someone with 300 million volts at 30,000 amps (something around a trillion watts) gives them psychic abilities. Or we want the chance God wanted to demonstrate a point about the sacrifice of our Lord after buzzing the actor portraying him. The second example is more difficult because we must also define the event more precisely: just what is being claimed here? That might depend on sets of premises that differ between people.
What we want, therefore, is the same as what we want in science. We do not want the probability of data assuming the Important Cause wasn’t operative, which is the rarity; we want the probability of the hypothesis given the data we observed! Read this.
Think: the probability, in coincidences, miracles or in science, of the data assuming the Important Cause is operative is 1. Obviously! There is nothing do with rarity here. (Pause here if you do not grasp this.) After all, the assumption is the Important Cause did the deed. So of course it generated the data we thought it would.
Besides all this, the probability of the data assuming that Important Cause is inoperative really doesn’t exist. Because nothing has a probability. For any event, miraculous or no, once we discover its full cause and conditions, the probability of what we observed is 1. Uncertainty only arises in absence of knowledge of cause.
Knowledge of full cause is often on short supply. What is the probability what happened to Caviezel is a miracle? Depends on the premises you bring to it. I give it some weight, but I’m not going to give it a number, because my premises are not definite enough.
What is the probability Thais was given psychic powers in her warm glow? Low, most low, I think, because I’ve seen many stories like this and can see the weakness in it. Same for Blair. For David? Who knows. I can’t say the probability is 0, precisely, in any of these cases. But I judge it low enough so that the decisions I make regarding them are all negative (for instance, I’m not going to follow any of the stories up).
You might entertain different premises.
Incidentally, the picture atop today’s post is from Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International, a support group of folks who received excessive electrons and lived to tell the tale.
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I knew a fellow win the Army who had been struck by lightning three times. Whenever he heard thunder, he curled up under something and cried.
A friend of a friend in the Marine Corps survived 7 helicopter crashes, four of them as the sole survivor. He had a chit from the Commandant crediting him as an Ace, and stating he was not allowed to board a helicopter ever again for any purpose.
Blair: “…lightning came inside and chased her to a back bedroom.”
Anyone who can outrun lightning, even if it’s only as far as the back bedroom, belongs in the Olympics.
Let us not discredit the demonic.
What are the political leanings of the naturally elotrocuted, and can we use them for our cause, or does their plight favor the false narrative of our opposition?
Those are the only questions that matter to Our Science.
I want to go back and describe the events that happened in the summer of 1992. It is the first time God did a miracle with the Holy Ghost right in front of my family, just because I asked.
It was a hot afternoon and my brother Jason and cousins Jamie and Chelsea had come to stay the night with us. It was a most special day to me already because I never got to spend much time with my brother. I always loved him and missed him so very much. I had sisters and so played on my own, watching over them everyday.
My brother lived with my grand parents Jack and JoAnn. He brought his car incase of an emergency because Jack wouldn’t let him stay there without one. They had no faith in God what so ever. My mom convinced them to allow him under this pretext of this false safety, in which they needed to feel assured. When my mom explained this I thought of how they did not care in the same way for us, at all. I did not understand why they didn’t want to help us that way as well.
That evening as a storm began to role in, my mom unplugged everything. It was part of her routine. She did this every time she even heard thunder. We had all been watching T.V. before that. I just enjoyed knowing my brother was with us.
With even the fan unplugged on that hot July day, it was quiet. I could hear the thunder in the rain. I was glad that we would pay attention to each other instead of useless distractions.
My mom began talking about God and her warnings of his powers. She had sets of warnings with stories from her life experiences. She spoke about these in greater detail than normal this time because she wanted my brother to know and believe in God. She feared he did not. She had always regretted having gave him up to her parents out of poverty. Her parents were cruel and would not let her live there with him. With an abusive ex-husband and no where to live she gave him up. But at least Jack treated him as a son.
In her first set of warnings she warned us about the power of prophecy that saved them from Gods power over fire. She was clear that he caused each thing to be for his own reasons. And that these things were scary. She told us, “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God.”
She told us that one night as she stayed in an old cabin on Anderson Cove Road, she received visions. In the dream she saw that she was in a fire. And when she looked around her whole family was burning. This scared her and woke her.
As she set up in the night she saw the cabin they were asleep in was engulfed in flames and smoke blew. She screamed, “Get out!” And she recited that this had been how God saved her and her family that night. She said, “That was all I needed to know that God is real. Children, mark my words. He saved us with a dream!”
In her second set of warnings she spoke about how she had been struck by lightning while she washed dishes at her mothers house. She said, “I barely heard thunder in the distance and tried to hurry to finish the dishes before the storm could arrive. I was pregnant and almost due with Joshua. I didn’t see it hit. It just came out of the water into my hands. It went out my elbows and I fell backwards onto the floor. It knocked me back. But I was fine and I thanked God he saved me. God protected me. It went out my elbows because they were bent.”
She reiterated her warning, “If you even hear thunder in the distance, lightning can strike. Don’t think it won’t. Listen to me children and do what I say?”
Her third warning was about flash floods. She told us, “Flash floods are all of a sudden. Don’t be in the creeks when it rains because they can change fast into a river. So fast you won’t have time to get out. There’ll be nothing you can do. So if there’s even a little rain, children, don’t be playing in the creek?”
Then the fourth and final thing she warned us was, “You better be ready for God to come back at any moment? Because no one knows when he will get here? He is like a thief in the night. He will come when you don’t expect him. And his time is near! Look at all the things going wrong in the world and you will know?”
As she spoke from the Holy Spirit to us in this manner, I began to pray silently as I listened. I prayed to God, “Why is she so afraid of you Lord? Why does she think unplugging that TV makes it safe from you? What a waste of time that thing is. When we could be getting to know each other and you. Just like we are now. How precious and short our time is on earth together and we waste it on that useless thing.”
I then began to ask, “Lord please show them your power. Please show her you can be trusted and not only feared?” I looked at the TV and said, “I know your power is hidden. I know it’s in that TV.” I stared at it. I despised what it takes from us.
I said in faith, “Lord if you want to, you can show them as I know you are right there? Please show them? I won’t so much as blink until you do. I won’t look away?”
I stared at the unplugged TV for a minute or so without blinking. My eyes began to burn and water. In that very second as I continued in these prayers, there was a huge clap of thunder and the lights went out. It became very dark. As this happened a ball of blue plasma and flames came out of the TV, that I was already staring at. It flew quickly in an arch up to the ceiling and came back down and stopped in my face. About one foot from me. We had a little staring contest.
At the same time, it picked up my brother, mother and sisters and placed them on the walls and stove. A sort of gravity on everyone but me. My cousins saw it but I didn’t see what happened to them. They were in the next room.
I did not blink. I watched in amazement. I seen into the power of my Creator. I trusted him as I always have. We met his Holy Ghost that day. He was floating near my face. It was so cool.
It was strange as there was no other sound or light when I communed with Ole Blue. I named it that later. There were these blue flames almost touching me but I felt no heat. The light from its center was touching me. There was a white light in its core. I was glad and amazed. I’m pretty sure it was glad and amazed too. I imagine popping out looking like that in front of any human terrifies them. I was like, “Hey man, What’s up? O, aren’t you super spooky.” So to understand my frame of mind in the moment. This was no less than I had hoped for. How could I be afraid? He did what I asked the same minute I asked it. My eyes were still open. He tested if I would blink. He did not wait. I held no fear and felt his love in my own heart. It felt like this moment lasted only one second and forever at the same time. Time itself was altered. All things stood still.
I have wondered things like, if it had planned me. It knew what I was thinking and everything I said I felt was true, and it knew that too. I had questions like, have I been saved for somewhere else. Did it just see my soul and save me for later. I was there with him for a minute. I felt like he had known me, before I was ever me. Like he waited and found me. I knew he knew everything about me and I was like him.
It began to go down and went through the floor. As it passed through at my feet, a wave of blue flames in a circle rolled outwards in the dark from where I was. There was again another loud boom, just as it left us. On the floor the flame was about a half of a foot tall from the exact spot where it went through near my feet. It left like a smoke ring of blue fire expanding outward, centering from me. I looked as the energy went slowly and began to move faster. Like time was speeding back up in front of me.
I saw Jennifer start moving again. I thought, “How weird.” She fell onto her hands and knees with her face down. Then quickly she looked up at me. The blue flames hit her and did a static electricity type of reaction to her skin. Her hands were in it. This did not burned her. In fact, the fire did not harm me as I stood up in it. She jumped up and flailed her arms trying to get out of the flames, that hit her from me. She thought it would burn her. Normally fire should have. Never did I feel afraid. I still look at this memory and I am still amazed. I simply cannot comprehend what happened. I can only describe what my senses recall and what I felt and what we did.
I could see that everyone started screaming but there was no sound at all yet. Then the sound and light began again and I could here them screaming. I knew what happened had been hard on the senses. I heard my mom yell loudly, “Get out, it can catch a fire. Get out children?!?” She had been through these types of things in her life already. My good people, she wasn’t kidding about her warnings.
The entire place was smoking profusely. It was as Solomons temple. I was calm and happy. They were all very terrified. They each ran to my brothers car. We didn’t own one ourselves. I thought it was funny that the security required for my brother to be there was used for hiding from God. Yea, sure buddy! Afraid from the storm, they imagined being in a car out of the house and rain was safety. They didn’t understand I had only stared at the TV.
So I stood alone outside in the rain in front of the old house. I had felt no such thing as fear because I had faith in my Father in heaven instead. I watched the smoke bellow out our front door and from underneath the porch. It was a black smoke. Dark plumes rising in the flashing light from lightning in the pitch of night. I had to stand alone, and think about him in my face. I felt at home in that moment. Like I always wanted it to be.
I heard my mom behind me, yell for me from the car as my brother stood at the open door. They were waiting on me. She yelled, “Josh! Get in the car, it’s still lightning?” As if I didn’t know. She didn’t understand why I had no fear at all. The storm was still fierce.
I prayed as I didn’t want to go hide in the car, “Why is she still afraid Lord? Why did they not see?” I glanced again at her waiting, looking straight at me. And looked one more time at the house beautifully smoking in the rain. I went and jumped in as she asked me. A pile of kids in the back seat. The first thing I thought, “How uncomfortable with so many of us. I was fine standing in the rain.”
I didn’t want her to be scared for us standing there. My brother had to stand out in the rain waiting on me. As it was a two door car. And I had to get in before he could set down in the front seat and shut the door. I didn’t want them waiting for me while afraid. I was only amazed. I was thinking about Gods power. I had just been shown in the very moment that I asked. I had learned the weeks before in Sunday school. That God controls the storms and the seas. I wanted him to look at me.
A short time later my mom, brother and I went back inside to see the damage. We saw how the TV was fried. There was smoke coming from everything. I went under the house and my brother followed me. We looked for any fire or marks from it going into the earth somewhere there. We found no evidence it was ever even there. Other than the TV didn’t work. There was no fire or charred places on the wood. No big hole into the earth one might have thought to expect. Just smokey, smokers.
My sisters and cousins didn’t want to come back in, still for a while. I didn’t want to set in the car. It took my mom a long time before she trusted going to sleep. Afraid it would burn down still. I slept well, in my own wild and wonderous tale. I mean I knew God had made the visit.
We lived in the old house on Worley Drive. I never wanted to leave that place behind. It was the true Glory of God I had known was real. Revealed for my family to see. I had hoped they would have understood why. I did not understand yet I could have told them it would happen before it did. But at least they saw what he is like. Back when I was just a little kid.
I told my mom alone a day later, “I prayed for that to happen before it happened.” She warned me right then, “Don’t you tell anyone else that but me? You pray to God about it? People won’t believe you. They will think you’re either crazy, lying or worse, if they do believe you, they will try and make you into some sort of a science experiment. And son, you don’t want any of these.”
One day near the end of July 2025 I drove over to a friends house. He came and spoke to me as I set in my car. I was overcome with the spirit.
I began asking him about his dreams. I asked him if he remembered them well. He said, “I do all the time.” Because I know what dreams really mean I was happy to hear he could recall them. As most people cannot. I asked him if he flies in his dreams. He said he was just like his normal self. I told him to believe all things are possible and then they will be. That his spirit is not bound as a human because you are not human there. I asked him if he had seen the ugly lion? It looks already dead but it lives. He said he did not. But that when he dreamed of snakes and they would kill him. And that on the day he does, there would always be a big fight around him. So he is weary of that dream.
I asked him if he knew that John the Baptist had said, “I baptize you with water for repentance sake but he who comes after me will baptize you in lightning and fire.”? That this was the Holy Ghost and it is real. He said, “I didn’t know it was lightning.”
I told him then, “I was born of lightning.” He said jokingly, “O really?” I told him “Yes, that my mother was struck the week before I was born. The summer of eighty four. And that it has appeared to me in front of others as I have prayed it to be so a couple times.”
He looked astonished. I began to tell our stories. I told him that my mom had told us all our lives about God’s powers. She told us, “When I was almost due with Joshua I was struck by lightning and was ok as it went out my elbow’s after entering my hands from the water. I did not see it strike. I just heard a little thunder in the distance and so tried to finish the dishes I was washing. It had just came out of the water. It had knocked me across the room and I was smoking. But I was ok and thanked God over and over.”
Just as I completed this first story, there was very close to us, a huge boom but no light or flash like should be normal. Dave looked around and said, “Weird”. With a startled look on his face.
I moved onto telling him how when I was almost ten. That my brother Jason had come over to stay the night with us since he didn’t live with us. That this had been a special day for me. He had even brought his car and we didn’t have one.
That evening a strong storm rolled in. My mom had sets of warnings about God’s powers that she told my sister’s and I frequently but with my brother there she went in on them extra. She wanted him to believe in God as we all knew that he did not.
She told us how she dreamed of a fire and woke up and the house was on fire and everyone there was asleep. So she yelled to get out. And that God’s vision to her had saved them from that fire. They barely made it out before it was completely engulfed. That this was all she needed to know God is real.
She then warned of the flash floods. She told us that you will never know when they will happen. To be on guard and not be in any creeks during rain. That it can come too fast to get out.
Then she warned us that God’s lightning was the scariest as she was still traumatized from being struck during pregnancy. But that God had saved her and Joshua from it.
As she was speaking these things, I began to pray. I said, “Lord, why is she so afraid when you have saved her over and over? Will you please show them your power and that it can be trusted and not only feared?”
I looked at our unplugged t.v. and said, “I wish we could always be this close to each other and you! Why do we stare at this waste of time instead of getting to know each other and you? I despise what these distractions do to us. How important it is in this short life we have to know each other and you?”
I said to God then, “I know where your power is hidden in that unplugged t.v. Why does she think unplugging it makes it safe? And will you now show it to them? Lord I have faith in you that you are there and so I will not so much as blink until you reveal it to them!”
I waited about a minute or two until my eyes began to burn and water.
Just then a flaming blue lightning ball came from the t.v. to the ceiling and back down to my face and stopped. It then went straight down through the floor. It was dark and the flames made a circular ring of fire that went outwards like a smoke ring or a small rolling wave on the floor. It was blue and I seen it hit my sister Jennifer. It did not harm us. It had picked them all up and put them on the wall and Jennifer on the stove. So as the flame went out she fell to the floor and it engulfed her as well. It looked like static electricity sparkles on her skin.
She jumped up screaming and we all went outside. Because my mom yelled, “Get out it could catch fire.” The house bellowed smoke.
Just then a second closer, louder boom rumbled. Again no flash of light at all. I felt that Dave was beginning to believe in God’s power. He said to me as fear began to set in that what I spoke is true, “Should I even be speaking to you about this outside?” I knew it wouldn’t matter if we were inside. I didn’t respond to the question.
I told him my dreams come true and are connected to these things. I asked him if he ever got Deja-vu feelings. He said, “All the time.” I said, I can explain this, “This is him showing you your future in your past in your dreams. But because you forgot, your spirit became hyper aware of the moment as it began. This is why you remember the moment as if you have already lived it. You know you seen it, you know you felt this exact way before. But you will recoil in logic as you know it is not possible. That is God showing you. I said, “When you remember it before it happens then it will really spook out others. Because you will remember the future before it occurs. I said, “Then in that day, you will understand the vision of the snakes.”
I said, “There’s one more time just the other day that I told my wife that God would bring lightning from the earth to my hand. That I had dreamed it. That I said weird things in the dream to my older son. But he was a grown man in the dream so it is the future. I told him that God would bring lightning to my hand from the earth if I was standing on the ground. But if I was flying then it would come out of my hand into the air.” It sounds weird just like dreams do but that the truth sounds like that if you don’t understand what it means. And when it is something you haven’t did and said yet, this makes it more confusing and harder to remember because you haven’t learned it yet.”
I told him I began making jokes and telling Ciarra all about the same stories because I had heard a small thunder in the distance like my mom had warned me of. I knew the moment was near.
So when the rain began to pour the power went out. My younger son Aaron came outside. I recited everything I told his mom, from the dream itself, to John the Baptist, to the jokes I made. When I got him caught up I told him, “God will bring lightning from the earth to my hand! Watch me! I walked over near the edge of the porch and when I put my hand out, just then a blood red plate formed on the ground below my hand. Out of it came about seven red orbs in a staggered formation. Each at a different height and none in the center of the plate. Then it exploded into red and white light. I dared not pull my hand back!
Just then there was the most massive boom right beside Dave. My car heaved and shook. No light flashed at all. Completely unlike anything I had ever heard.
Dave had enough. He said, “I’m done talking. I’m going in.” Fear over took him, as I imagine would most everyone. I know him to be brave. As he walked quickly away I jumped out of my car and said in a joke, “What, God ain’t going to hurt me?” He said “Might me. If you dream of snakes there’s going to be a fight and he went inside.”
I laughed and spoke with God. Told him that was funny. There was no storm at the time there. There had been an isolated one earlier in the day. It was a little cloudy still. No lightning, rain or reasonable explanation other than God. I knew that had helped convince him. I thought of The Son’s of Thunder.
I went on my way back home knowing I had did as God thought delightful. I had a smile from ear to ear. I went home and told my sister and family what had happened.