The Power of Prophecy

In my living room hangs a huge painting done by my friend Irene Prat. It shows a green and orange ribbon laid down over rolling sand dunes. At times the ribbon disappears behind a dune, only to reemerge on the hill behind it. At the horizon point the ribbon breaks off from the dune and gently curls into the sky. I call the painting “Prophecy,” because that’s what it reminds me of. Prophecies are like ribbons of light leading us across the desert.

Many times the “prophecies” leading us are our own beliefs and values. We learn a lot about life through death, and some of my experience with self-fulfilling prophecies came from the deaths of those closest to me.

My father was a voracious athlete. I started to write the word “tremendous” but that would have implied that he was successful at it. He wasn’t. He was simply voracious about it. He played basketball at the YMCA until Mom finally forbid it after his latest episode of getting run over by the teenagers. He played racquet-ball and handball and tennis and swam and turned down promotion after promotion in his company because it would have meant giving him less time for his sports. Although he did love eating ice cream by the gallon, he was very careful otherwise about his weight, and had a nice physique. People thought he was much younger than he was. Dad had a thing about illness. He refused to acknowledge it. If you were sick, all you needed to do was work out a little harder, and you’d get better. He also could not go into hospitals, because the very smell of a hospital would make him faint. Mom said that he even fainted when they gave him a blood test before they got married.

He told me one time, “Laurie, if I ever get so old that I can’t play sports, please promise me that you will push me over a cliff.” When the subject of death came up, he would laugh. “I am going to drop dead either playing tennis or racquetball.” Sure enough, one month after his sixty-fourth birthday he was playing racquetball with a friend of his, had a massive heart attack, and dropped dead on the court. Nobody was able to revive him, although there were several doctors playing at the club at the time. Oddly enough, he had just had a physical the week before, and his doctor had told him he had the body of a man twenty years younger. I can’t help but think that my father prophesied his own death.

I will share two of the many self-fulfilling prophecies I have personally experienced.

The first one is short and simple. In 1974 I declared in my journal that I was going to write a book called Jesus in Blue Jeans. Twenty-three years later, I held the published book in my hand.