A young man was viciously attacked by a pit bull about a year and a half ago.  His hand and wrist was badly mangled.  His whole life shut down.  He grew fearful of other people.  He lost his job as a salesman.  He lost his wife, his car and his home.  Though he read the Bible twice looking for answers and begged God to heal him, nothing happened.  That just made him feel all the more alone.  An SGI member told him about Nam Myoho-renge-kyo.  The philosophy made sense to him and he started to chant.  He immediately started to feel better and he could feel his life opening up again.  When he came to his first Buddhist Introductory meeting three days later, he announced: “The fact that I am here talking before all of you is proof that this Buddhism works.  I have been unable to talk to more than one person at a time for more than a year and a half.”  He stayed after the meeting for a slow Gongyo.

Joseph was at the 40th anniversary Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s “I have a Dream” speech in Washington D.C., when he overheard a conversation.  One woman was asking another: “You mean you gave up a living god for a dead one?”  Later he talked to the other woman who explained that she was a Buddhist.  After hearing what she had to say, he thought to himself: “That woman made sense.”  Later he was bicycling from a place that he was staying to his apartment.  Part of his bike path was a sidewalk between two buildings of the Washington DC Community Center.  The SGI was celebrating its “Celebration of Life”.  There was food, fun, music and the members invited him to join them in the festivities.  He found them warm-hearted and open-minded.  They invited him to the Introductory Meeting and he came.  He said it seemed as though his life was directing him towards Buddhism.  He also stayed for slow Gongyo.

A young woman had a remarkable revelation while in college:  She discovered that God did not exist up in the heavens.  Instead God was in her heart.  She didn’t know what to do with this knowledge until a person in her dance class told her about Nam Myoho-renge-kyo.  She and another friend in her dance class also stayed to learn slow Gongyo.

Wendy has a bi-polar condition (some people call this manic-depression).  She met a woman at a mall who told her about chanting.  Wendy tried chanting and found that she could calibrate her condition with daimoku.