I think most people, at least most Christian people, probably believe in miracles. We hear of stories of healing at Lourdes or we hear the friend of a friend of a friend whose cancer disappeared for no reason, and we say it’s a miracle. We believe in them. We put our faith in them. They remind us that God is good.
But do we believe in miracles in our own lives? Real actual miracles that happen to real actual people that are in our daily lives?
Those are much harder to believe. Those make us question ourselves. They make us search for other answers, other explanations, other reasons. Answers that make more sense to our sensual selves.
And I don’t know why it’s hard to believe in miracles in our lives, but I have a theory.
I think they make us feel unworthy. Or rather, they remind us that we are, most definitely, unworthy.
We hear the prayers we offer up. We feel the pleading in them and the pain in them and the occasional trust in them. We know they are real.
But then we turn around to the next person, and we see them in prayer. We see their pain. We see the pleading with which they offer up their desires to the Lord. And honestly, it doesn’t make sense.
Why us and not them?
We can’t in good conscience think of a single reason why our prayers were answered when another’s weren’t.
And so we decide not to believe. We blame it on coincidence or placebo or any other number of factors that make more sense to our rational minds.
We can’t imagine why God would grant us this miracle, and so in order to make sense of it in our own minds, we decide not to believe it.
Hmmm.
That’s a simple way to live. It reduces a lot of stress. It takes away all of the questioning in our minds. It makes our world predictable again. Even if we can’t blame it on coincidence, we can at least say that there is some scientific reason for it. We tell ourselves that we just don’t understand it at this point.
And then we can go back to our lives. We can go back to our predictability and our desire to live for ourselves in our lives as we choose.
The commonplace expects nothing of us. It doesn’t stretch our minds. It doesn’t stretch our hearts.
And, honestly, it doesn’t make us look like fools. In this world, cynicism seems to be the benchmark for sanity. To live non-cynically in this world is to open us up to a whole lot of ridicule. And possibly disappointment.
Magoo and I went to go hear a speaker at our church last night. He spoke of miracles ever so briefly. He told us that miracles don’t happen to prove to us what God can do. We already know that God can do anything. We know He is all powerful. Instead, he said, miracles occur to show us who God is.
And so that leads me to believe that if we are faced with a miracle, we have to question that. We have to look inside ourselves and our beliefs and ask ourselves who God is. What has this shown us that we didn’t know before? How can we incorporate this new insight into what we already know about God?
And that can be hard because many people have the man in the moon view of God. Someone up there, out there who arbitrarily decides what to grant and what not to grant. We see him as a fairy godfather of sorts who we can safely ignore until we have a desire. And when we do, we offer it up to him. If he grants it, we go back to our lives. If he doesn’t, we decide he’s not trustworthy. We decide that he doesn’t care.
But facing a miracle in our own lives breaks that wide open because we can’t say that He cares about our needs but that He does not care about the needs of those people He doesn’t heal. Nothing makes us feel so small as seeing the real work of God in our lives.
So when we try to make a miracle make sense, we come up short. And in that incongruity between what we think we know and what we experience, we have no choice but to surrender and accept that God is simply beyond our understanding. We don’t know a grand plan. We don’t know how things will turn out. We don’t know why, though we all suffer, some of our suffering is eased in one way while another’s isn’t.
It just doesn’t make sense.
And maybe that’s part of what we are supposed to learn. That God’s ways are not our ways and that we could not possibly understand God’s way.
Stuart Chase said of miracles, “To those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.” And our pastor says that there is no such thing as a coincidence.
Like everything else, we are given a choice. We aren’t forced to believe. But when we reach the end of our days, we will see the path we have chosen and the fruits of that path. When looking back, I would much rather say that I erred on the side of hope and healing and God rather than on the side of cynicism and predictability and the commonplace.
For me, it’s a leap worth taking.
God is good.