I tried to put this event out of my mind, but that never worked very well. So all I could do was wait and see whether: (a) God had actually intervened in my life, or (b) I was losing my mind.

Exactly one year had passed since my ex-wife had left. I had begun to heal and continued to go to counseling. September 16, 1984, was a Sunday. I had a couple of friends over to my apartment that evening for a barbeque. I lived upstairs in the back of a four-unit apartment building. The entire street was comprised of the same four-unit apartment buildings, each one spaced about ten feet apart, each one the mirror image of the other.

A couple of weeks prior, a young couple had moved out of the apartment immediately across from mine in the upstairs unit next door. On September 15, the day before the barbeque, I had seen some people moving furniture into that vacant unit, but I had not met my new neighbors. That Sunday night, just after dark, there was a knock on my door while my friends and I were eating dinner by candlelight. I opened the door to a woman I didn’t know.

She introduced herself as Claire. When she saw that we were in the middle of dinner, she apologized for the interruption. She quickly explained that she and her roommate had just moved in next door and their power wasn’t on yet. When I realized who she was, I asked her if she’d like to come in. She declined. She told me she was a teacher and had early-morning playground duty the next day. She was wondering if I had a wind-up alarm clock that didn’t require electricity. She had to be sure that she got to school on time and was afraid that, without an alarm, she might oversleep. I told her I didn’t have a wind-up clock, but my wristwatch had an alarm. After testing the volume, she agreed the watch alarm would be fine, so I took it off, set the alarm for 5 am, and handed it to her. She thanked me, apologized again for interrupting our dinner, and left. The encounter probably lasted two minutes. In the morning, I found that she had left my watch on my doorstep before I got up with a note that said, “Thanks.” I thought nothing more about it.

I had started working at what was then one of the Big Eight accounting firms in January of 1984. Long hours have always been the norm in public accounting, and my experience with that firm was no exception. When I was on a client engagement, I typically got to work around eight in the morning and didn’t get home till seven or eight at night. For the rest of September and early October, I was out at one of my big clients. This company was publicly traded and had some incredibly tight reporting deadlines, so quarter ends were always brutal. It wasn’t uncommon for us to work twelve to sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week, during these crunch periods. When the push was over, we could breathe, but nobody had a life while the heat was on. By the second week in October, we had met the reporting deadline, and I was able to get a little break.

October 9 of that year was a Tuesday. I got home about 5:30 that afternoon. I was more than a little distraught. The day was, for all intents and purposes, gone. I had been mindful of the date since waking up that morning. I’d known I would be at client sites all day. If I were going to meet anyone, I assumed, it would happen while I was out and about. I’d had hope while I was out in public, but now that I was home, where I lived alone, I had no chance of meeting anyone. The day had come and gone. I’d met no one. Nothing. Not so much as a hint of opportunity. So much for God and His promises!

As I climbed the stairs to my apartment, I was moving toward another pity party. Home alone now, I felt like all chances of meeting someone were lost. When I walked in, I completely closed the door on any hope that my encounter with God had been real. I cursed myself for my stupidity, for having placed even the slightest bit of faith in that idiotic brain-fart of almost a year ago. What could I have been thinking? What was wrong with me that I would dare think God would bother with me? I knew I couldn’t just sit there and descend further into the abyss. I had to get out and clear my head. Somehow life would go on. I fought off my growing depression and changed clothes to go for a run.

At about six o’clock, I opened my door to step out for my run. As I turned back to lock the door, I heard the door of the upstairs apartment immediately across from me open and close. I didn’t know it then, but that was the door to hope reopening. As I turned again to walk across my porch to the top of my stairs, I found myself looking directly across at the girl who had come over nearly a month before to borrow the alarm clock. I had been so busy with work that I hadn’t seen her since. We couldn’t miss seeing each other now, though: we were walking straight toward each other, just thirty feet apart. We hit the top of our stairs at exactly the same time and started down in lockstep. She was wearing running clothes as well.

I’m not positive who spoke first, but I think she said something like “I haven’t seen you around.” I said I’d been working a lot. And it turned out she was gone most weekends, visiting her boyfriend who lived ninety miles away. These circumstances didn’t facilitate our casually running into each other. It also reinforced for me right off the bat that she was not available. Being down already, I didn’t need to get hit over the head to get that message. Trying to be cordial, I observed that it looked like she was going for a run too. She said she hadn’t gone on a run since she moved in and didn’t have a route in mind. She asked where she should go if she wanted to do about four miles. I told her that my short route was about five miles and that was my plan that night. I asked if she just wanted to follow me. She said sure, as long as we took it slowly.

We started running, and we talked as we ran. We went at a slower pace than I was used to, so the run took longer than usual. When we got back home, we walked around the block to cool down. After that, we sat at the bottom of my stairs and talked for close to another hour until it got very dark and we started to get cold. As we headed up our separate but parallel staircases to our respective apartments, I remember thinking that she seemed very nice. I also couldn’t help but note that (just like the Invisible Man’s prediction) she had brown hair and brown eyes. And, at nearly 5’8,” she was about an inch and a half taller and much more athletic than the slight actress who was by then my ex-wife. Unfortunately, all that said, she also had a long-term boyfriend to whom she was practically engaged. That pretty much killed all possibilities. There was clearly no reason for me to be excited. We said goodnight as we each walked across our porches to our own front door.

We ran three or four more times over the next two weeks. I was getting home early enough that our schedules were aligning. Our coming out of our front doors at exactly the same time happened often enough that it was starting to become a bit of a joke.

Claire and I were developing a casual friendship when our evening runs got interrupted. It was late October, and I started having some stomach issues—an intense pain on my lower right side. This came and went for a while until one day in early November when it didn’t go away. I went home from work early, thinking I had the flu. The pain built throughout the evening and into the night. I started thinking I might have appendicitis, but some of the symptoms were missing. When the fever and vomiting kicked in around 4:30 am and I started to double over in pain, I finally decided I better get to the hospital.

By the time I arrived at the emergency room and saw a doctor, my appendix was about to burst. The surgeons got it out before it ruptured, but this was almost thirty years ago, back when they made a real four-to-five-inch incision for appendectomies. They also had to irrigate my gut to be sure nothing had leaked. I remember waking up thinking, “So this is what it feels like to be stabbed.” After I spent a couple of nights in the hospital, they let me go home, but I was still pretty weak. I couldn’t drive, and the surgeon didn’t want me climbing stairs, so I spent a night or two at my parents’ place before I insisted on going back to my own apartment.

I was stuck at home, unable to even go downstairs to get my mail for a couple of days. On the third day I finally went down to my mailbox about 4 pm. I was making my way back upstairs—pasty white, one slow step at a time—when Claire got home from school and saw me on the stairs. One look and she knew something was wrong. (Other than having lost fifteen pounds, being white as a sheet, and sweating profusely, I’m not sure what gave me away.) I explained what had happened, and she dropped her stuff and helped me upstairs. All the while that I was telling her “I’m fine,” I was secretly grateful she had shown up. I wasn’t sure I could have made it back to my apartment alone. After she got me settled on the couch, Claire ran home, changed, and then went to the market for me. Rather decent of her, I thought.

That was the real start of our friendship. Claire would come over and we would just talk—for hours. When I was home early enough, and once I was better, we would run together in the evening. If she were around on the weekend, we would talk during the day, and then I would go out on dates at night. The fact that she was involved with someone else, and I was dating as much as I could, actually freed us up to get to know each other without any expectations. I just assumed there was no possibility of a relationship with her, so I never connected the dots the Invisible Man had outlined for me.

Things were purely platonic until about the end of the next summer. That’s when Claire started calling her boyfriend by my name, and I started to realize that I had a much better time talking with Claire than I did with any of the girls I had been dating.

By the end of Labor Day weekend in ’85, I realized I had feelings for Claire and told her I loved her. She broke up with her boyfriend, and we started dating immediately thereafter. About a month or so later—and almost two years after my encounter with the Invisible Man—I was over at Claire’s apartment and saw some mail on the kitchen counter. One envelope was an electric bill addressed to Marie Claire Benton. “What’s this?” I asked. I thought it must be a mistake. She explained that her mother had named her after her best friend from college, Marie, but she had always gone by Claire.

By this point Claire and I had talked for hundreds of hours. I had met her friends and family. I had seen her mail on multiple occasions. No one, anywhere, ever, called her Marie! I’d known guys who went by their middle name, but I’d never known or even heard of any woman going by her middle name. (I’ve done a little research since then, and it’s estimated that only one to two percent of women in the US go by their middle name.) Now, nearly thirty years later, I still do not personally know another woman who goes by her middle name! Given all this, when I found out that Claire was actually Claire’s middle name, I was shocked.

Right up until that moment, I would have said that everything that had happened—even though the events had happened just as predicted—was nothing more than coincidence. If for no other reason than self-protection, I couldn’t let myself accept the possibility that reality was unfolding as the Invisible Man had said it would. While I sure hoped that what I had experienced was real, I have to admit that I had no faith that was the case. I was too afraid of being hurt to trust a voice that I might have invented. Plus, right up until that moment, I was also sure that the last bit of the message—about her going by her middle name—was wrong. As far as I was concerned, if part of the message was wrong, all of it was wrong, and then none of it could have been a message from God, because God doesn’t make mistakes!

After Claire told me about her name, everything changed. I could no longer pretend that the prediction of two years earlier was just a coincidence. I could no longer ignore that something remarkable had happened; I had to take it seriously. We were engaged by Christmas and married in August ’86. I was head over heels in love. I’d never felt that way before—further reinforcing what a mistake my first marriage had been.

In the years since Claire and I married, we’ve certainly had our struggles. There have been times when I’ve asked God, “Why did You do this to me?” I know she’s done the same. All that said, she remains the most honest, decent, innately kind, and devoted person I’ve ever met. She’s a brilliant mother, educator, and coach for other parents. We’ve raised two kids who are the greatest joys of my life. And we’re still together nearly thirty years later.

None of the details of the prediction had unfolded as I had imagined they might, but all ten of the points I had written down two years earlier had come to pass just as the Invisible Man said they would. It’s one thing to accurately predict ten out of ten details about dates, physical description, proximity, and name from a known set of variables. The odds that such a prediction could happen by chance are roughly five billion to one. It’s quite another thing to accurately select ten specific variables from a population of all possible variables and then to accurately predict the precise sequence in which those selected variables would be realized over the next two years. The odds that the prediction I recorded could happen by chance are unfathomably small.

Wrapping my head around this extraordinary sequence of events was a two-step process. The first step involved reaching a conclusion about what had actually happened; the second involved processing what it all meant. I got closure on the first step within days of learning that Claire went by her middle name; I’ve spent decades on the second.

As for what actually happened, I think there are three possible explanations: First, I randomly dreamed up a prediction and it randomly came true. Second, I experienced some kind of auditory hallucination, and over the course of the next two years, I subconsciously manipulated my life—and the life of a woman I had never met—to orchestrate the fulfillment of all ten criteria that were predicted during that hallucination. Third, in the midst of my grief, God Himself took pity on me, decided to intervene, and shared with me elements of the soon-to-be story of my life.

Let’s take these three options one at a time. The idea that this was a completely random event is, in my opinion, absurd. I can’t buy it for two reasons. First, the nature and context of the message stand alone in my experience: I have never encountered anything comparable. Second, the idea that the generation and fulfillment of this prediction could be random strains even my capacity for self-delusion. I’ve had enough statistical training to know that the odds that this could have happened by chance are virtually impossible. In fact, to say that the fulfillment of this prediction was statistically improbable is an understatement comparable to saying that it is unlikely a man could stand on the surface of the earth and jump to the surface of the moon.

I can’t buy the second option either. In the last several years, a number of theories have been floated about near-death experiences and angelic encounters. Some of these theories suggest that, in times of extreme duress, our brains engage some form of primal survival mechanism that tricks us into believing we are being assisted by a divine power. No doubt some people will offer this as an explanation for what I experienced, but I think there is a big problem with this theory. My Invisible Man specifically predicted ten criteria in the exact sequence in which I would realize them over the next two years. Unless our brains have the ability to travel through time and report back on future events, I don’t think this theory works.

Although it is still hard for me to accept the third option without question, I see no real alternative. I don’t believe in God because I’m a man of great faith. I believe in God because I was confronted with a firsthand experience that I can’t dismiss. I’ve done the math! I believe because I no longer have the option of not believing. When somebody hits me over the head, I tend to take that person seriously. You’re welcome to disagree with the conclusions I draw below about who God is and how He wants us to behave. I readily admit that, over the last thirty years, I have often had my doubts and have regularly challenged these conclusions myself; however, I have always returned to the same conclusions. All that said, given my experience, there is one conclusion I have never challenged: God is real, and we are not alone.

Unfortunately, He didn’t give me any way to prove His existence to anyone else. I wrote my notes on the night it happened, I kept them all these years, and I scanned them to include in this book. I could have faked all of that. I didn’t, but of course I can’t prove that. I told three people of my encounter within hours of it happening, and I told a fourth two years later. I could have lied to them. Again, I didn’t, but I can’t prove that either. Only I know what really happened: I begged God for help, and either He—or somebody He sent—showed up and helped me.

The story I have shared above is completely true. I have witnesses who can attest to the fact that I told them about my encounter with the Invisible Man and shared the specific details of his prediction with them within 24 hours of the event happening—eleven months before the first elements of the prediction began to play out and two full years before the entire prediction would be shown to be correct.

For those of you who have previously concluded that there is no God, that this life is all there is, and that when we die the party is over, I must respectfully challenge your conclusion. I present you with new evidence and this dilemma that only you can decide for yourself. As I see it, you must either: a) conclude that I’m lying through my teeth, b) rethink your position about God, or c) come up with a plausible alternate explanation. If you come up with something good for (c), please let me know. I’d love to talk to you about it.