Sunday, October 7, 2012

Miracles

If we take the Old Testament literally, they happened often.  If we look at the New Testament, we find that only Christ really worked the big, flashy ones.

Why?

I think that the big, flashy miracles, like turning water into wine or healing the sick instantly by simply saying "Be healed," became thin on the ground to remove proof that God exists, and that He loves us.  He wants us to have faith. 

It's not easy.  Not when we lose friends and family to horrible things like Alzheimer's and cancer and car accidents and stupid circumstantial accidents.  It would be so much easier to believe if God didn't let us lose our grandparents and parents and brothers and sisters and friends to things other than age; if He would just heal that illness, or put down his hand and prevent that accident, it would prove that He was there.

And that completely negates the need for faith.

It's so easy to get angry with life, to get angry with God.  It's so easy to turn our backs on Him, with the justification that "He obviously doesn't care about me...if He exists at all.  If He isn't willing to do this little thing for me, it's obvious that He just isn't there." 

I could have gone that way but for the fact that I wouldn't have survived my childhood without His help.  There were so many times I had the crap beat out of me before I turned seven, so many times I was picked up and thrown head-first at walls, so many times my male genetic donor drove drunk with me and my sister in the car, none of us strapped in.  I cannot imagine surviving all of that, relatively intact, without divine aid.

There aren't the big flashy miracles that nobody can deny happening so much anymore.  That doesn't mean that there aren't small, unnoticeable ones happening all around us every day.


2 comments:

  1. Big, flashy miracles still happen; often enough to "prime the pump" as it were. Google Sr. Lucia of Fatima and Lourdes, France, as examples.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ah, but they don't happen nearly so often as the Bible records. Just often enough to postpone despair for the faithful.

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