From Your Minister
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Through the years I have heard people use the word miracle to describe things that I would assign other names: good luck, good medicine, pure chance, hard work. Overall, I’m with the everything is a miracle camp, one of those people who use the word often and mean it.
It’s a miracle that any kid makes it to adulthood alive. It’s a miracle that any marriage makes it twenty years. It’s a miracle that we don’t all hit each other’s cars on the freeway every day. It’s a miracle that buildings, bridges and airplanes, built by human minds and hands, generally do what they’re supposed to do, staying miraculously upright and aloft.
It’s a miracle that we can breathe, speak, sing, read poetry, love.
As we assembled this issue of Quest, we got into kind of a squabble on the team about the nature of miracles. “If everything’s a miracle, nothing’s really a miracle!” someone said. We argued about whether events described in various pieces of writing really qualified as miracles. In the end, we agreed that there is a good deal of subjectivity involved in this whole topic.
Generally speaking, I’m willing to accept anyone’s experience of a miracle as what they call it, because why not? Who does it hurt? But some so-called miracles are actually something very different, not what I want to think of as miracles at all.
A compulsive gambler I know told me about a miracle he experienced. Just when he had maxed out all his credit cards, he miraculously received an offer for another one! This felt like a miracle to him because with a credit record as bad as his, he had not expected it. To me, it felt like a credit card company preying on a vulnerable person, not like a miracle at all. “Just check out those sky-high interest rates!” I noted, but he had already maxed out the new card, too. It will be a miracle if he is ever out of debt.
How many times have you heard someone say something along the lines of, “It was a miracle…I was supposed to be on that plane that crashed / in that building that burned / on that ship that sank, but God wanted to spare me.” I am delighted that any life is spared from tragedies. But when people start saying that God wanted to spare them, the only logical correlation is that God also wanted to kill the people who did die. And that’s just not a God I know. I’d totally go along with “it’s a miracle I’m alive,” but not with the idea that it’s part of a master plan, with God as a cosmic chess player orchestrating wins and losses.
I guess if miracles are remarkably good experiences against all odds, then it would be only reasonable to believe that the opposite of a miracle is a curse. I was once standing in a long bank line, trying to do some last minute business on my way out of town, when a woman burst in the door. “Is anyone driving an orange car?” she asked. I raised my hand; a sickening dread rose in me as well. I was driving an orange car because my green car, which I needed for a trip, had already been hit.
The green car had just replaced a white car, which itself had been hit, and then it got hit immediately after I took possession. The orange car was a loaner I’d been given as they fixed the green car, so I could drive it far, far away from all these accidents.
“Someone just hit your car in the parking lot,” the woman told me as we walked out the door together. Involuntarily, with sobs threatening to overtake me, I moaned, “I am cursed!” She looked at me with utter kindness and said, “You are not cursed.”
And, indeed, I was not cursed. Because when the driver who hit my latest car tried to slink away without so much as a note, this woman and her kids chased that driver down on foot in the parking lot! This woman I did not know, with so many kids in tow I couldn’t count them all, had been my savior. The kids now surrounded the embarrassed driver who hit my car. It was something like a miracle!
Maybe miracles—or curses—are simply in the eye of the beholder. I could have come out of that incident in the bank parking lot focused on the curse of my series of damaged cars rather than the miracle of the family that ran (literally!) to my aid.
I would rather look for miracles—and I see people creating them around me all the time. The addict in recovery who said to me, “I don’t know if God turned water into wine, but I know that God turned me into a sober person.” The parents who struggled with infertility, adopted a child, and said, “There is no other child in the world who could ever be more ours than this one! Thank God we were infertile or we would have had the wrong child!” The woman who got a kidney donor just when she would otherwise have died.
I’ve heard many of these stories, and they never cease to fill me with wonder. While the rational part of me could attribute them to luck or chance or happenstance, I like being on the lookout for miracles. I like to watch for them and claim them as they come by. Personally, I would say there’s no such thing as too many miracles!
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