A good friend of mine from Long Island, the late Daniel Smith, of Northport (he died in 9/11; pray for him), once told me that while heading into a midtown Manhattan skyscraper for a job interview, he was approached by a homeless fellow who had his hand out for money. Danny was no sucker, but he felt compelled to give the fellow something. All Danny had on him was a single twenty — more than he could then afford to give — but he handed it to the beggar.

Well, Daniel Smith got the job. It was a few miles to the south of where the interview had been, in Lower Manhattan, apparently at one of the firm’s other offices. He told me that when he showed up for work the first day, there outside. — miles from where he had first encountered him, stood the same beggar, smiling as Smith entered the building.

Makes you go back to the Scripture that says, “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

from a fellow named Jim Singer in the vicinity of Toronto, who also reported apparitions of the Lord and Mary.

Jim told me that when he first moved to Canada from Croatia, he found himself nearly destitute and sitting on a park bench in downtown Toronto wondering where he could get a job. “I was beyond crying,” he told me. “I had no idea where I would stay nor what I would do.”

Having spent a night in a public square, he was watching crowds mill about the next afternoon. “As I was sitting there suddenly a couple of men came up straight in front of me and started talking to me. One of them had a shortsleeve shirt. I can still see him as if it were yesterday. Medium height, balding, just a rim of hair, or anyway darker hair, almost like black. A little paunchy. Average build. His face was round, not flat; normal nose. I initially thought that this person was an immigrant who spoke English and was probably of Hispanic background, from Spain. He was well-dressed — not a tie, but neat and clean and a good shirt. He was carrying a dark brown valise. I’ve often thought since, what was that bag? He was holding it under his right arm. His pants were lighter colored, probably gray, and his shoes I remember well. They weren’t typical shoes. They were like mesh shoes.

“The second man I can’t describe as closely. Also in a short-sleeve shirt, dark hair, but a full head of it, same height but skinnier and dressed a little darker. I didn’t pay as much attention to him. The first man was the one who approached closest while the second one was to his left and slightly behind. And it was the first man who did all the talking.”

“Sudden;y there were these two men just right there in front of me. I had seen them coming but didn’t realize they were coming directly for me.

“The first man was looking straight in my eyes, a serious look but not austere. I could sense that he was caring but not in the sense that he would take all of my burden. “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “You need a job. You need a place to stay.”

He then told Singer where to go to find one. “He didn’t give me the precise building or name of a company but he named the street, Evans Avenue,” Jim recounted to me. “And gave me directions on how to get there. He told me what bus to get on and that I needed money for two bus zones. He described some factories. He pointed northwest. He said, ‘Just go in that direction.’ I turned my head for a brief second and when I turned around they were gone, vanished. They weren’t there, and that really puzzled me, because they had no time to meld back into the crowd — a fraction of a second and they simply were no longer anywhere to be seen.”

Singer took their advice, though, boarded the buses — and found a job at an ink company on Evans Avenue, where he stayed for the next two decades.

I was baffled because when he described all this to me, at one poiunt he turned to his wife Natalie and asked her if he should tell me. I asked, tell me what. He said one of the men looked just like me — one more in the many strange things I have encountered in my life.

What did that mean?

I have no clue. I just know this: maybe there were prophecies in the man’s valise. For one day, Singer would claim to receive predictions from the Lord, though ones that were far more detailed than presented by the hitchhikers.

Were these prophecies — at last count filling a sixty-page pamphlet — what were in the one stranger’s valise?

“The disturbances which, in these times, will be brought to you by the heavens are intended to exile the malefactor from your souls,” he claimed to later be told (during an apparition). “Soon will follow difficult and tragic times of the malefactor’s oppression over you. You are in great danger. Each one of My children who decisively and unyieldingly opposes the shining darkness with My teachings and Love will suffer a great deal in My Name. But I promise that every one of these children will enjoy the eternal Paradise in My embrace.”

The evil one, he claimed to have been told (in the late 1980s and early 1990s) “is multiplying his violence and oppression.”

Soon, he says he was told, the Lord would “wash the face of the earth.”