Chapter 1 — The Search Begins

The Living Witness

The man in the wheelchair stood.

Slowly. Unsteadily. His legs trembled beneath him. For a moment he looked as though he might collapse. Then he took one step, and another, and another.

He walked.

I was eleven years old, standing with my family among thousands of people in the mountains of Lebanon during Easter 1977. I remember holding onto my mother’s dress, my brother beside me, and staring at a scene my young mind could not explain.

The crowd erupted. People cried openly. Some fell to their knees. Others embraced complete strangers. Praises to God rose in every direction. Then a crack of thunder rolled across the mountains. The ground seemed to tremble. People looked upward, expecting rain, but no rain came.

Instead, golden flakes began drifting through the air.

They were soft, fragrant, and shimmering. Some settled on my face and hands. When they touched my skin, they dissolved. Some reached my lips, and even now I remember the taste and the fragrance — sweet, beautiful, and unlike anything I had known.

That moment did not give me a complete theology. It did not make me a historian or a scientist. It gave me something both simpler and more demanding: a reason to search.

Here the sample ends. The rest of Chapter 1, and the sixty chapters that follow, live in the book.