Perhaps sometimes as we hear of Christ giving sight to the blind, healing the lepers, and even raising the dead, we wonder why He rarely works such miracles today. More often, though, we merely accept that miracles are a thing of the past and not of the present. By our own lack of faith we confirm their absence from our lives.
Take a moment to ask yourself this question: do you really want to see miracles in your life?
It might seem easy to answer yes right away, but if so then I would dare to say that it may arise from a failure to understand the demands that a miracle makes upon you. For a miracle requires metanoia—conversion of mind—conversion of heart.
In a talk my friend Josh gave a while back, he spoke directly to this reality: "Miracles happen when God tells us what to do and we do it."
If we deeply examine our own hearts and minds we may find the opposite reality existing: we want to tell God what to do and have Him do it. That is the miracle we hope for. We want to see the sufferings in our lives—or in the lives of those we love—removed. We want to rejoice in the glory of the healing power of the Divine Physician right now. We want to be restored to the fullness of life that we may live more abundantly as has been promised. We want to be fully alive because we feel so far from it.
Yet those good desires leading us to Christ often drag along with them a reluctance to give up whatever is keeping us from union with Him. We end up clinging to patterns that prevent us from receiving the grace He wishes to give us. Merciful God that He is, He allows that. He never takes away the suffering we see as evil when it saves us from worse evil or gives us a crutch to rely upon in our own brokenness that we are not yet ready to give up.
Moving out of that brokenness means letting go of our own victimhood. However, as my friend Joseph reminded me recently, so few are willing to do that. Whether we realize it or not, we often like to see ourselves as the injured party. It's a safe place to be. For who can fault the victim?
Instinctively we know that if we remain as victims before the face of a cruel world we can't blame ourselves for our fate. Where we have failed again and again, we can become martyrs of circumstance and therefore save ourselves from the heavy burden of guilt. When everything seems against us and we want to hide in our beds, we can assure ourselves that after all it isn't our fault and that if God had wanted us to do more He could have made it possible.
It is far harder to embrace all the failures and sufferings as part of our reality without accepting also the crushing condemnation that certainly is not of God. For to do so means to stand vulnerable as Christ did before Pilate—silent and without defense.
Yet think of what Christ said finally in answer to Pilate's questioning:
"You would have no power over me if it were not given you from above."
Nothing has power over us except by the will of our Heavenly Father. Nothing can harm us against His most loving will.
Yet just as Job wrestled with his sufferings, as everything he held dear was taken away from him, we too wrestle with our own pain, the worst of which may be our own failure to live up to our own expectations of ourselves or seeing how our brokenness hurts those we love. In that darkness and confusion, we can rebel against our situation without yet being willing to open ourselves to God's love. We can fall into self-hatred and despondency, forgetting that the Creator of the Universe rules our lives.
Why should we not see miracles? Why not expect God to transform our lives radically even where we struggle most?
The only reason I can see is because we go to Him with outlined expectations, limiting Him to the finite box we have prepared for His working, instead of going to Him with open hands and open hearts. What might happen if we began to listen? Would we hear God's voice if we let our inner selves fall silent in adoration before Him?
"Miracles happen when God tells us what to do and we do it."
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