Why I Believe in Miracles, and Why It Matters

I wrote this post from the Atlanta airport during my lengthy layover back on December 22; didn't want to pay $5 for the wifi I needed to publish it on the spot. So I saved it for future publishing. And then I forgot to publish it. So here it is. It's a sequel to my "Jesus is not UPS" post, some further thoughts on the miraculous. Thanks for reading!

Not ready to leave this topic just yet. So what totally and completely befuddles me about people is how quickly things become dull and uninteresting to such adventurous and horizon-chasing creatures as humans. My wife and I are flying back to North Carolina from New Orleans today, and on our first flight, I couldn’t but notice – no one looks out the windows on airplanes anymore. I myself am fascinated by being able to look down on the terrain from 27,000 feet. But to everyone else, boooooorrrrrrrrring. We keep pushing the frontier, inventing things like air travel that, once we get there, give us temporary excitement, maybe a pat on our own back, and then perpetual sighs. So bent on achieving things that appreciating our own achievements is generally avoided for the way that it prevents us from going out and achieving more stuff. Simply perplexing.

Why is a miraculous and all-powerful God such a problem for those who believe and those who do not? Because essentially, we all have the same problem. It’s the Tower of Babel problem. For those who believe, it’s okay to acknowledge his power, but we want those miracles to be our own. And for those who do not believe, but who are fascinated by the idea of the miraculous, attributing the idea of the miraculous to some selfish, presumptuous, power-hungry being means that the miracles can’t be our own. We build towers to say that we built towers. We open savings accounts to say that we built a good and secure life for ourselves. We strive for straight A’s to say we made the Deans’ List. And we get mad when a God who knows better re-routes us.

In actuality, while we try our darnedest to care more about ourselves than about anyone or anything else, no one cares as much about us as the God who created us. Everything he chooses for us is in our own best interest, and everything he encourages us to do, to think, to believe, is for the best life possible for us. The problem is, we don’t know ourselves well enough to know what’s best. What is so fascinating about the fact that God knows the number of hairs on my head is that, well, I don’t (although I do know it’s decreasing…FAST). In the same way, I’d sure like a million dollars, but God knows well enough how quickly my soul would decay upon the reception of that million dollars. The reason for this is simple. It is only in a place of need that we find God. He loves us enough to, rather frequently, give us some life- and soul-saving needs. So in an age when we have forgotten God’s power for the miraculous, or lost hope in his desire to choose miracles for us, maybe we will remember that it is our need for our own personal achievements that has made God’s power so monotonous in our eyes.

As I look back on this year, I can choose to overlook the joy of getting married because God chose to withhold miracles in the deaths of my mom and grandfather. Or I can choose to acknowledge that the value of a blessing isn’t relative to its nearest curses. Or I can go even further and acknowledge that miracles and blessings even show up in the curses. Ovarian cancer typically is unrelenting in a person’s first bout with it. My mom got three bouts, seven years, and getting to see two kids graduate from college and get married. And it sure was hard losing my grandfather just two months thereafter, but I certainly remember standing over his bed in intensive care back in 2006, saying goodbye to him just in case the highly unlikely emergency surgery didn’t do the trick. And you can say what you want about just exactly what or who did the trick, all I know is we got three more years with him.

So yeah, I believe in miracles. And I believe that God the Father conceived God the Son by God the Holy Spirit in the virgin Mary. And I believe that God the Father raised from the dead God the Son by God the Holy Spirit thirty-three years later. And I believe that if you or I or anyone believes any bit of that craziness, it must inform the things that happen in our lives and our world. The humane incarnation of the divine or the divine resurrection of the humane are not the kind of things that happen in a vacuum. They are the kind of things that happen all around us, all the time.