Two suns and a demon

By Joe Ruff

Photos by Dave Hrbacek The Catholic Spirit

Meisha Johnson, 43, was drawn to her knees more than a decade ago by a voice she couldn’t name but knew she had to obey. It happened one afternoon while vacuuming in Blaine, as her living room was engulfed in a mysterious and palpable light. An inaudible voice or prompting told her to get on her knees and pray. As she obeyed, glancing outside the window, Johnson saw two large and vibrant suns side by side, suspended in the sky.

“I knew right away I was being pushed to my knees,” Johnson said about her confusing and somewhat frightening first step toward conversion.

“I stopped vacuuming and went down to the ground,” Johnson said. “It was as if God was speaking to me, like, directly to my heart or my conscience. I knew exactly what I had to do. There was no option. I became very heavy, and I knew I had to get (down) on the ground.”

At the time, Johnson knew very little about God or faith. But that dramatic event drew her to seek understanding, at first on her own and later through other people she would encounter along the way, and finally through deep and continuous academic study. Over the next decade, she moved from having no religion at all to the Roman Catholic Church, joining the Church in 2019.

Now director of pastoral care and adult faith formation at St. Joseph of the Lakes in Lino Lakes, Johnson recounts how the Lord reached out to her seemingly out of nowhere. She grew up in Circle Pines near Blaine with her parents, Paul and Dian Johnson, self-described “hippies” without any religion themselves. She knew next to nothing about prayer, God, or what it meant to desire him.

Dramatic conversions often come at a point in people’s lives where they cannot go on as they have been, which opens them to God’s presence and assistance, said Paul Ruff, assistant director of human formation and director of counseling services at The St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul.

Johnson’s experience occurred when she was undergoing a difficult divorce. Having studied journalism with a focus on broadcasting at the University of Minnesota, she was working part time as a TV host and independent contractor on various television projects. She was on “thin ice” financially, particularly as a single mother. Still, she believed at that time that she was strong enough to take care of everything on her own, not knowing she needed God, Johnson said.

“I was spiritually blinded at that time in my life. I was not in control, but I thought I was. In hindsight, I was just going through the motions of life, doing what I had to do. But God, in his infinite wisdom, knows how to reach us right where we are. And for me, that would be doing something mundane like vacuuming, not paying much attention, not thinking about anything beyond having to pick up my two daughters from school.”

Suddenly, “my entire living room was engulfed in a bright light. The first thing I thought was it had to be a UFO or something, because when you have no spiritual context, all you know is that it’s not the sun peeking out from behind clouds. It’s something that invoked immediate anxiousness and a kind of wonder.”

The light and the inner voice prompting her to drop to her knees and pray were “so thick and so heavy, so palpable,” Johnson said.

“I had never prayed before, and I had never seen anyone pray on their knees … so for me, the first thing I thought was I must be going insane.”

At that moment, she heard what appeared to be a song about Jesus playing on her radio. Johnson said her radio may have been on, she isn’t sure, but she knew that she had not turned it to a Christian station.

“It was something that I marked in the background,” she said. “But in that context, when there’s so much going on so fast, you’re not slowing things down and picking every detail apart. It wasn’t until years later, as I started to grow in wisdom, that I’d begin to replay the events of that day and say to myself, ‘Oh my, that was God.’”

Regaining her strength and composure, she rose from her knees and grabbed her cellphone, took a picture of the two suns and shared it via text message with her best friend. “I said to her, ‘Run to your window. Tell me if you see this (the two suns in the sky).’ And her response to me was, ‘No, that is not out my window. But it’s definitely in your picture.’ I started fumbling around looking for my keys, trying to compose myself. I had to pick up my kids from school but just had this ‘thing’ happen to me and was feeling panicky. I started to wonder seriously if I was having a heart attack or if I was dying or something.”

Connecting with her best friend later that afternoon, after a series of odd events, her friend warned her that she (Johnson) was “under spiritual attack.” And oh, was she right, Johnson said.

“I have realized over time, looking back upon my journey in all of this, that what was at first scary has now become wholly beautiful … because all of it was a way for God to reach me, and my family subsequently, through a vision, through a series of remarkable events,” she said. “It did more than get my attention. It set my heart on fire for the truth.”

After the episode in her living room, and now leaving her home to pick up her children from school, Johnson continued to be mesmerized by the two vibrant suns suspended in the sky. She turned on the car radio, but no station was talking about it, she said. “There was no one getting out of their cars