A Story as Told by Dr. John Hislop
from "Sai Baba, The Holy Man and the Psychiatrist", by Dr. Samuel Sandweiss, M.D. (p.175)

Baba, a large group of students from the Sathya Arts and Science College at Brindavan and a few other people, including myself, were walking down the bank of a road to a stretch of level sand of the dry Kekkanahalla River bed. I was walking alongside Swami, and as we passed a bush, he reached over and pulled off a couple of twigs and held them up like a cross. Hislop, he said, what is this?

"Well, Swami, it is a cross," I answered. He put the twigs in his hand, closed it and produced three rather slow breaths on it. Then he opened his hand and gave me a cross with a figure of Christ on it. This is an image of Christ on the cross, he said-- not as artists have imagined Him and as historians have told about Him, but as he actually really and truly was, with stomach pulled way in and ribs all showing because He had had no food for eight days.

So I said, "Well, the cross, Swami, tell me about that."

He said, This cross is a piece of the wood from the original cross on which Christ was crucified.  Then he said something very interesting. To find a piece of that wood after two-thousand years presented a little difficulty.  I suppose that is why he breathed rather slowly three times. Usually he gives one puff, and a ring or whatever just appears.

I noticed something odd and asked, "Swami, what is the hole at the top of the cross?"

He replied, That is the hole where they hung the cross on a standard.

The cross is so small that the details of the figure of Christ escape the eye. A friend, Walter Wolfe, came down to our place in Baja and took some photographs of the cross that greatly magnify the details and show the beauty of the tiny figure of Christ (head size is 3/16 inches and overall length is 7/8 inches).

When Walter Wolfe brought some enlargements of the photographs down to our house, we were standing around the table, looking at the pictures and thinking of Christ and Baba, when suddenly - from a perfectly clear sky - there was a terrible crash of thunder. Then a very strong wind blew through the house, rattling the shutters, banging the doors and blowing the curtains. The next day an article in the San Diego Tribune reported that a mysterious thunder and wind had come up unexpectedly from a perfectly clear sky at five o'clock the previous afternoon. My wife reminded me that Christ died on the cross at five o'clock and that the Bible tells of thunder and earthquakes which arose suddenly.

I can only conclude that there is a tremendous amount of power in that little cross.