Miracle: The reason I am here

It’s not that the conservative, Evangelical community that I grew up in didn’t believe in miracles; we most certainly did!

We just didn’t expect to see them very often.

The miracle at the center

There were some very obvious miracles that we pretty much had to believe in order to call ourselves Christian. Foremost among those miracles was the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead after his crucifixion and death.

I am sure that there are some modern Christians (as well as post-modern and post-post-modern ones) who claim a kind of “secular” Christianity that focuses more on the moral messages of Christ than on the need for his having been resurrected.

Growing up, I didn’t buy into this, though. I have no need of a God in order to be moral. To me, the significance of Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection is in the fact that God became human somehow in order to have a relationship with us.

It’s not so much about being good to one another as it is about being one with God (which, naturally might make us good to one another.)

I’m with the apostle Paul, who writes in 1 Corinthians 15:13-14:

But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:

And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

Other translations go so far as to translate that last word as “worthless,” “void,” “useless,” “empty.”

Similarly, I’m with author and poet John Updike, who rebukes modern non-supernatural takes on the resurrection in his powerful “Seven Stanzas at Easter:”

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

Miracles, not metaphors

It is easy sometimes to go through the motions of my faith, just going to church and focusing on being good. But occasionally I have to step back and remind myself that all of this hinges on a man waking up from the dead and walking out of his own tomb.

I believe in a God who produces real miracles, not just metaphors.

Surrounding the Easter miracle, upon which all of Christianity is based, there are also the collection of miracles reported about Jesus and the apostles—the wine into water, the healings, the exorcisms, the feeding of the thousands, the walking on water, surviving the snakes and the poison, the miraculous prison breaks, and so on.

Then further back, throughout the Hebrew Bible, there were so many miracles that have become so tame and domesticated in our common imaginations, as we use them as figures of speech, but imagine the possibility that these things really happened: the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, surviving the lion’s den, the magical writing on the wall, the three men in the fiery furnace, and the rest.

Looking around at our modern, scientific world, one might ask, how can I believe there were so many miracles back then, when there seem to be so few miracles now?

One possible answer, which I was taught as a child, is that God used miracles at certain points of history, in order to draw attention to what is happening then and there. This explains why there would be such a concentration of miracles during Jesus’ ministry—to draw attention to him and to compel us to talk about him, and make a decision about whether or not Jesus was who he said he was.

The notion that miracles happen in these historic clusters would also help explain why we see fewer miracles today.

Some who travel in more Pentecostal or Charismatic circles might say that there are indeed many miracles happening right now, and that we could have them, too, if we only had enough faith. But I have a hard time believing that some people who are praying for healing, or money, or other blessings are not getting what they asked for because they lack faith. If they lacked faith, why would they be asking God for help in the first place?

I don’t claim to know why God answers some prayers with a Yes and some with a No.

But I do believe in miracles, even if they are uncommon.

A heritage of miracles

I have seen minor miracles in my own life, such as when I was laid up with mononucleosis in high school, but had been cast in the upcoming musical and needed to be in rehearsal the next week. It was bad, too. I couldn’t eat for three days because my throat hurt so bad—and I was a growing boy of 16!

I prayed, using the “name it and claim it” formula I had learned in the Charismatic church, and asked Jesus to heal me. I believed I received my healing when I prayed, and over that weekend, my symptoms went away, my throat stopped hurting, and I was able to show up at rehearsal in full voice on Monday afternoon. I kicked mono in a week, and for that, I give God the glory.

There were other little miracles like that—cars starting when the battery was dead or the gas tank was empty. Unexpected checks showing up in the mail when finances were tight. That sort of thing.

There were also legendary miracles in my family. I have mentioned in earlier posts that my Grandpa Wilson was a preacher. His mother, Alice Wilson (who we called Grandma Whitehair to distinguish from my Grandma Wilson, who had fiery red hair her entire life) was a strong-headed, zealous Christian, whose adventures earned her an almost legendary status as a prophet and healer.

I heard one story about a drought that plagued the family farm, sometime back in the 1920s. My great-grandfather, Frank Wilson, (Grandma Whitehair’s husband) worked and worked the farm that year, but with so little rain, nothing would grow. While Grandma Whitehair was a staunch Free Methodist, Frank had little to do with the church. She continually told him, if he would give his life over to the Lord, God would take care of them and it would rain. One day, as they rode down the road in their buggy, Frank was finally fed up with the nagging and the dry spell, and he pulled over to pray the Believer’s Prayer. Just as soon as he did, the sky opened up and it finally began to rain.

Now, if that is not a great family legend, I don’t know what is. Nobody else was there to see it, and the rest of us only knew it as a yarn told at family gatherings, but it represented the central place that miracles had in our family lore.

My late uncle Ron Wilson, who was also our family’s dedicated genealogist, found this story about Alice Wilson from during the Great Depression in the 1930’s, told later to a local newspaper by Alice’s daughter, Florence:

"She can especially recall one occasion when she was about eight years old.  'Mother gathered us around the kitchen table and told us flat out there was nothing in the house to eat, ...nothing, no oatmeal, no flour, nothing'.  She recalls her mother saying, however 'We will eat' Florence said, 'I can remember thinking 'Where's the food going to come from, drop out of the sky?'  But the family sat around the table and waited.  After what seemed a very long time, there was a knock on the door and a woman was standing there, and said to Florence's mother,  'We just had a church supper and we have lots of things left over, soup, sandwiches.  Do you think your family could use them?'  Her mother told the lady, 'You're just the answer to prayer that we were expecting.’”

These were the kinds of stories I grew up with. Our faith—including belief in miracles and the expectation that they will come to pass—is an essential part of the glue that has held our family together.

Legends, maybe—although I don’t know the storytellers to be the type to not tell the truth. But there was at least one other miracle for which there is evidence—I know, because that evidence is me.

Mom’s major medical miracle

I remember the story from years ago, and some of the details are murky for me, but I can sketch out the story as I recall it. It was the 1950s. My mom and dad, who had recently gotten married in their late teens, were expecting their first baby.

At least they thought they were expecting a baby. When my mom thought she was close to term, an examination revealed that the fetus was small and undeveloped, but that all of that time a large tumor—large enough to be mistaken for a child—had been growing in its place.

And if the heartbreak of losing a child—one’s first child—wasn’t devastating enough, the doctor told her that because of her cancer, they would have to immediately perform a hysterectomy to save her life. This was just before the weekend, and that Monday, my mom was scheduled for surgery.

As young people, my parents always lived near my grandparents—the Reverend and Mrs Wilson. And in those days, my great grandmother, the prophet Grandma Whitehair, was often around my Grandparents house. When my folks came home from the hospital, they were heartbroken that they would not be able to have children.

Well Grandma Whitehair would have none of this. She went into the bedroom where my mom was laying down, and started to pray over that young body. I don’t know if the others joined her, but if they prayed with any of the fervor with which I remember my grandparents praying when they were older, that room must have been filled with a mighty drone of desperate people of faith. “Yes Lord,” they said, “This young woman will be healed. We rebuke that cancer in the name of Jesus. Take it away Lord. This woman will be whole and healthy and healed!”

It was probably exhausting for my mom, who tried to keep her head up and put on a brave face as she neared the most terrifying day of her young life.

But when she went to the doctor on Monday, and they examined her in preparation for her surgery, the doctor made an amazing discovery.

The tumor was gone.

There was no medical explanation for it, aside from the fact that tumors do sometimes naturally go away without any known cause. But my family knew what happened. My mom had been miraculously healed.

She then went on to have 3 healthy boys, my 2 older brothers 3 years apart, and me , surprise that I was, 13 years later. None of us would have existed had the doctors gone through with the surgery.

But here we are, by the grace of God.

So we believed in healing. We believed in the power of God to intervene in this world, beyond just changing our attitude about sickness. We believed that God could really touch and restore lives in a literal way.

We didn’t see it all the time, but we believed that power was there when we needed it.