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; 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.’”
Conversion: Embraced by Love
This four-part podcast explores the conversion experiences of three local Catholics and is a production of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and The Catholic Spirit. It is made possible by a grant from 1891 Financial Life, where “the heart of our work is the heart of your world.” Listen Now
The light
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.”
A demon
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 to see the phenomena in the sky.” But since her friend had confirmed seeing the suns in her photograph, Johnson knew they were indeed there.
“This is when I had an encounter with the other side; with what I now describe as pure evil,” Johnson said.
She drove past what appeared to be a woman driving very slowly. “It was as if she was having car trouble. But when I passed her coming up to a stop sign, I saw her speed up behind me as fast as she could. When I made a complete stop (at a four-way stop), she slammed on her brakes behind me, and I saw in the rearview mirror her body kind of fly around in the car.”
The woman got out of her vehicle, long, dark hair pulled in front of her face and fists tightly clenched, and walked toward Johnson’s car.
“The first thing I thought was, ‘OK, after everything I’ve just been through, I am in no mood.’ I began to roll down my window to ask the lady what her problem was. I was stressed out and in a hurry to pick up my daughters from school.”
But when the woman reached Johnson’s driver’s side window, “there was something so horrible about her,” she said. “I was instantly scared.” Before Johnson could roll the window back up, the woman began to speak in an angry growl. “I knew it was a language but not one that I had ever heard before, and nothing I could ever repeat,” Johnson said.
Years after studying sacred theology, Johnson wonders if it might have been an ancient language. “I do not know for sure,” she said. “But at the time, I certainly had never heard anything like that. I just knew she was speaking another language in a horrible and scary tone.”
As Johnson rolled up the window to get away, the woman began punching and kicking at the car and tried to open the back passenger-side door, which was locked. Johnson began driving forward, and the woman ran back to her vehicle to pursue her. Weaving between cars and cutting off traffic, “she was following at nearly impossible angles, doing anything she could to stay right by me on the road,” Johnson said. “It was hostile and scary.”
Not shaking the woman, Johnson called the police, described what had happened and warned them, “something is not right with the woman.” She supplied their location, described the other vehicle, and let the police know she was trying to lose the woman and get to her daughters’ school on time. Driving quickly through side streets and making sharp turns, Johnson lost the woman and made it safely and on time to pick up her children.
So, why did this attack happen right after Johnson’s vision of the two suns?
Johnson said she believes evil wanted to disrupt God’s plan of intervening in her life that day. “Looking back, I see how I had just had this incredible moment with my Creator. Something completely supernatural had just happened, which was to become the start of my conversion, and I think that upset evil (forces),” Johnson said. “They wanted to disrupt what was happening.”
“Maybe the evil showing itself at that moment on the road was an attempt to hurt me, or maybe it was to take my mind off the divine vision in the sky,” Johnson said. “Maybe it was another act of God, where he wanted to show me that evil does exist. It could be any or all of those things. But that woman-thing definitely became a distraction from keeping my eyes fixed on the (two) suns. I would give anything to go back to that moment and just savor it … to not take my eyes off that vision.”
A long journey
Johnson was left trying to sort it all out.
After an initial period of confusion, Johnson read the Bible cover to cover. “As with any book, I thought you read it chronologically,” Johnson said. “I went to the first page of Genesis, and slowly made it all the way through to the last page of Revelation. It was then I knew who my Savior was. I knew who had reached out to me that day in my living room and I slowly began to understand why. I started to love the salvation story. But being that I was still a newborn Christian, I was far from having all the answers.”
Inspired by the Bible, Johnson understood that prayer and continued learning about God and the Christian faith had to become part of her everyday life.
“When prayer became a part of my daily routine, all those conversion seeds began to blossom, and I couldn’t get enough. With that blossoming came discernment, and with discernment came a different worldview, which I now know as a sacramental worldview. But at the time, I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening to me. The only thing I knew for certain was something in my soul was changed. For the first time, my life was being led entirely by God.”
Johnson said the Lord seemed to be telling her during those early years of conversion, “‘I am going to show you your next steps. I won’t lay it all out perfectly for you. You’ll have to have faith. I’m going to call you somewhere and you’re going to have to trust me.’”
That led to a 21-day Daniel Fast in 2014, giving up choice food and drink, while devoting extra time to a specific prayer request. Johnson’s worries at that time included the financial strain of working as an independent contractor and as a single mother of two.
Forty-eight hours after that fast concluded, Johnson received a telephone call from a Phoenix news agent she didn’t know, and he didn’t know her, telling her that a Philadelphia television news outlet (CBS-KYW) had asked about her. “Meisha,” Johnson said the agent told her, “never in my career as a news agent have I seen this. A top-five news station in Philadelphia just called me inquiring about you for a job opportunity.”
Months of prayer and negotiation followed, and Johnson was offered an on-air reporting job in 2015. Through prayer and support from her family, she moved to Philadelphia. “This was my first real test of stepping out into the unknown and trusting God, even though I had no idea what he was doing,” Johnson said.
The move across state lines, while clouded with many challenges, proved to be the biggest opportunity for her to grow in relationship with God, Johnson said. It was a move that would ultimately equip and embolden her to change careers entirely.
After three years on the East Coast, rather than renew her TV news contract, Johnson felt compelled to return to the Midwest and study the Bible. Not understanding the differences among Christian denominations, she enrolled at Bethel University in St. Paul, an evangelical Christian school. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in Christian ministries and biblical studies. It was there that God revealed to her that she was Catholic, at heart and in principle.
“While I was at Bethel, the journalist in me kept asking questions like, ‘Well, what happened (in history) before that? Well, what happened before that? And while asking those questions, I was led to Catholicism. It was there I found myself; I found that I was Catholic through and through.”
Another stint in college followed. Wanting to study the fullness of Church history, Johnson enrolled in a Catholic sacred theology program online at St. Joseph’s College in Maine. She graduated with a master’s degree in sacred theology in February 2022. Currently, Johnson is pursuing a doctorate in Catholic ministry through Washington, D.C.-based Catholic University of America.
“I want to spend my life now sharing what God does in our lives, how he loves us, and what happens when we love him in return,” Johnson said. That was one reason she was willing to share her faith journey in a video series in preparation for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’s Synod Assembly in June 2022. Those preparations and the Synod Assembly itself helped Archbishop Bernard Hebda discern pastoral priorities for the next several years in the archdiocese. The archbishop explains the priorities and the inspirational work of the Holy Spirit in his November pastoral letter, “You Will be My Witnesses.”
“We have a huge responsibility to reach out to the people around us who don’t know God or about his salvific mission,” Johnson said. “There are so many out there like I was, who are either far from him or don’t know him at all. We must witness to others by our actions of knowing, loving and serving him. As Jesus has warned us, apart from him we can do nothing.”
FRUITFUL FAITH
Meisha Johnson’s conversion has reached well beyond her own growth in faith. The friend with whom she shared her conversion photo of two suns was confirmed Catholic on the same day as Johnson in 2019. After hearing her daughter’s story and learning more about Catholicism, Johnson’s mother, Dian, joined the Catholic Church in 2021; Johnson’s father, Dian’s husband, Paul, was recently baptized, and the two regularly attend Mass together. Johnson’s youngest brother and her two teenage daughters, one in college and one in high school, are all joining the Church at this year’s Easter Vigil.
“My conversion was never supposed to be about just me, but about everyone around me that I love, and that God loves so much as well,” Johnson said. “This is the incredible God we serve.”
AND THE PHOTO?
The cellphone photo with the two suns in the sky taken during Meisha Johnson’s initial conversion experience “has long since been gone,” Johnson said. She and the friend she shared it with didn’t save it or have it printed.
“At the time, we didn’t think to save it. We have gone through many cellphones since then. But in some way, I believe that was part of God’s plan, too. Sometimes, I think he gives us something unique and special in a specific moment in time, for that time alone, and for whatever reason it was never intended to be saved, but rather remembered.”
Conversion: Embraced by Love
This four-part podcast explores the conversion experiences of three local Catholics and is a production of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and The Catholic Spirit. It is made possible by a grant from 1891 Financial Life, where “the heart of our work is the heart of your world.” Listen Now
