God, I need a miracle, but perhaps I need something more, and that is what God offers me and you. Something of depth and hope.
There are times in life when there is a cry from the heart for a miracle. It’s that diagnosis, the loss of a job, a relationship breakdown, a financial loss. Search your heart, and you will know the times when you have cried out, ‘God, I need a miracle.’
What’s a miracle?
One definition describes a miracle as ‘an extraordinary event manifesti...
God, I need a miracle, but perhaps I need something more, and that is what God offers me and you. Something of depth and hope.
There are times in life when there is a cry from the heart for a miracle. It’s that diagnosis, the loss of a job, a relationship breakdown, a financial loss. Search your heart, and you will know the times when you have cried out, ‘God, I need a miracle.’
What’s a miracle?
One definition describes a miracle as ‘an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs—eg the healing miracles described in the Gospels.
The word miracle comes from words such as mīror (“to wonder at”), from mīrus (“wonderful”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)meyh₂- (“to smile, to be astonished”).
A miracle should cause you to be astonished, smile and wonder. It should cause you to think about something beyond yourself.
Take note that in these definitions, there is no sense of a time frame. We add the time frame, which is usually in the impatient NOW!
We, like impatient demanding toddlers, want it all, and we want it now.
But we look at the stories of Jesus and see the immediacy of people being healed, bread and fishes being multiplied, people being raised from the dead, etc.
We see the outcome, the cessation of struggle, and we want it now, now, now. Yet in God’s poetic economy of time, ‘a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.’ 2 Peter 3:8
Still, we pray and beg and plead for miracles. We sing, fast, give, and stand on our heads. We are much like those prophets of Baal dancing around the sacrifice, thinking that if they dance more, their God will do the miracle. 1 Kings 18:26-29
Perhaps that version of God has to die or at least be told to leave the building.
Something sad within me gets touched when I sense people are waiting for the miracle to happen. They use language that speaks to some sort of magic God. They are waiting for God’s magic wand to be swept over their problem so that with an ‘Abracadabra,’ the problem disappears.
I want a miracle, but actually, I want to know God more than the relief of earthly struggle, and that is where the tension is. Better life or deeper knowing.
The miracle may not happen according to my terms of reference. The cancer may not go away, the marriage may continue to crumble, and a hard heart refuses to soften to grace.
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