Sometimes, a divine intervention pulls up next to your steaming, smashed up car on the rain-slicked roads in Hollywood, wearing penguin-colored habits, looking down at you with compassionate eyes. "We have been praying for you to accept Jesus," the nuns say. This is the story of Natalie Cole, who was in the steely grips of a drug addiction at the time of the crash and who credits this brief intervention with saving her life.

In her autobiography, she also credits divine intervention with saving her and her husband from a fiery inferno in Detroit. Ms. Cole certainly isn't the only one with miraculous stories, attributed to a higher power. Albeit inexplicable, these stories serve as a source of hope for millions of people.

Janice Bender was told she had months to live, as the metastatic lung cancer spread throughout her frail body. A medical intervention like liquid morphine and chemotherapy seemed her only hope, but even those options had doctors shaking their heads, telling Janice's husband, Frank, that he had better prepare for the worst. So Frank quit his job as a sculptor, yet he did finish one task: resculpting the mask that lay over St. John Neumann's face at his public shrine in Philadelphia.

Father Kevin Moley came from the Church to see Janice and before leaving he placed a relic of St. John Neumann up to her forehead and said a prayer. Instantly, Janice felt a warm, soft feeling expand inside of her and over the next few weeks, dozens of tests confirmed the inexplicable: the cancer had completely disappeared! While they aren't particularly religious people, the Benders attribute the miracle to the divine intervention of Saint John Neumann. "Maybe St. John Neumann wanted this intercession as a gift to him," Moley said, commenting that the new face Frank sculpted was "perfect."

In Lourdes, France, a fourteen-year-old peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin Mary eighteen times in the cave of Massabielle, from February 11 - 16th, 1858. By the Virgin Mary's twelfth appearance, a woman's paralyzed arm was cured in the spring when she appeared at the site of Mary's appearance. Similarly, in 1901, a man named Gabriel Gargam, who had gangrene feet, was paralyzed from the waist down, was bed-ridden and weighing just 75 pounds, came to be healed at Lourdes but fainted from the exertion.

After he could not be revived, they placed a cloth over his face and thought him dead, but when the priest came to give him last rites, Gargam suddenly sat up, stood up and said he was cured! In 1923, epileptic and paraplegic John Traynor found physical and mental healing after bathing in the grotto.

He was so cured, in fact, that he didn't remember how long he had been ill! Today, 6 million people come to Lourdes, hoping for divine intervention that will heal them from illness and disability, even when medical intervention has failed.

Sports stars frequently request divine intervention and sometimes, they say, it works! Many of us have a hard time believing things we cannot see, hear, touch or experience with our own eyes.

Yet many of us want to believe there's a higher purpose for us, some force that can help us in our darkest moments, a comforting answer that there's something out there. Whether you've seen a miracle or not, the power of positive thinking and the healing power of faith cannot be dismissed.