On multiplying our miracles through amplifying one another's testimony
What does a miracle look like in your life?
This week I read the really good news about a friend of mine’s recovery from cancer. From the outside, I realized it seems like the closest thing I can see this side of earth to a miracle. But then I wondered whether it feels like a miracle to her?
It may not, I mused, given what I’ve seen of the pain, the fear, the doubt, the treatments, and the ups and downs, over what has been many slowly lived years. And in fact, I worry that it would cheapen her suffering for someone else to flippantly pronounce it so.
All this got me wondering, What do miracles really look like? How or would we know one if we even experienced it? And who gets to proclaim those miracles today?
In the context of my own life, for instance, I worry that people would presume a miracle would look like my daughter being cured of the progressive disease she was born with. But that’s not what I pray or even hope for. Indeed, this question of what a miracle would look like for my family led me to such startling, arresting peace when I realized:
We are living inside of our miracle.
Our miracle arrives with every year, every month, every day our daughter continues to live alongside us, not healed from her disease or removed of her disability, but living with us just as God made her. A few months ago, she miraculously passed her tenth birthday, and I worried that I was going to be a big, blubbering mess at her party, because just the thought of that unpromised decade filled me with weepy gratitude.
Caption: Joy at Lucia’s tenth “Madeline in Paris” themed birthday party on our patio. Photo mine.
As I look back to scripture, I’m surprised by both the diversity and consistency of Jesus’s miracles. For instance, sometimes these miraculous acts were very public, sometimes they were actually quite private. Sometimes they affected one person, other times they fed many people, or saved a boatload of disciples from a storm.
But the common thread I ran across is that those who experienced them, realized that Jesus was at work in these acts, and they experienced peace and awe. In other words, the miracle was revealed to and received by for whom it was intended.
There’s been so much harm committed by well-meaning Christians who presume what healing looks like for disabled or sick people and who want miracles for the sake of miracles rather than truly for those who are disabled or sick. But what if we can’t really comprehend a miracle unless we’re living within it? What if what’s so miraculous is how Jesus meets us with the healing that we may actually need, not that which the world necessarily thinks we need?
I suppose it may sound like I’m going all analytic on miracles when they most certainly defy logic. Or that I’m arguing in favor of an overly personalized approach to miracles, something like the miracle is only in the eye of the beholder. Instead, I’m insisting that we importantly need to leave the miracles up to God, because our casual proclamations of them for others say too much about our own discomforts or desires to be faithful or true. But we also ought not to presume that they happen only to others and not to us.
Caption: Double rainbow visible over the church by the cemetery after a storm. Photo mine.
In fact, I realize that had I not asked myself, what does a miracle look like for me, I might have radically overlooked what God has done and what God is doing. I might have neglected the particular testimony that God has given to me by assuming to know better or comparing what God is up to for or with my neighbor.
So if anything, what couldn’t hurt, is more testimonies of those miracles so that we can all open up to God’s diverse, yet present and persistent work in our lives.
Closing in on the season of Pentecost, I’m so eager to know:
What does a miracle look like in your life? What testimony has God given you? And for those who are very much longing and waiting with hurt and pain, how can I pray with you today?