These days, someone is always trying to explain away Biblical miracles. The little girl wasn’t really dead, she was probably in a coma. It wasn’t that Jesus made 5 loaves and 2 fishes feed the multitudes, it was that his words inspired people to be generous. The Red Sea didn’t really part, it was just dryer that year (or that time of year), enough that people on foot could walk safely but chariots got mired down.
We don’t like what we can’t explain. And actually, I’m not opposed to looking for scientific explanations for miracles— to me, it’s like backstory, or “The Rest Of The Story,” and as a novelist, I’m all about that.
But under one condition— that we are doing it to seek greater understanding of the amazing hand that created the forces of the universe.
NOT to try to pretend that hand doesn’t exist at all.
It’s a good thing when explanations help us see, not random occurrences of a harsh, mindless universe, but instead one new facet of the beautiful reality that is God, the maker of all processes and all forces, the one who set the planets spinning.
I think one reason we struggle with the signs and wonders in Scripture is that we don’t feel like we have them anymore. Why would there be miracles then, and not now?
I don’t have a complete answer to that, but I do think there are more wonders in the modern world than we give credit.
There are the small ones, like snowflakes under a microscope.
When I first saw these photos, it was in the context of someone trying to demonstrate that God can’t possibly exist because the universe is explainable if you just look closely enough.
But to me, those photos tell the opposite story. Each snowflake is unique, and yet it appears as something created: purposeful, symmetrical, artistic— the same as we would do if we were the ones creating them.
To me, those photos are evidence of, at a minimum, intelligent design. For me as a Christian, they demonstrate the love and care I was taught that God embodies.
There are other wonders, too. In The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom is in the concentration camp with her sister, hoarding liquid vitamins to try to stay alive. The jar just won’t run out. It just won’t. And then one day, they get a windfall— someone gives them a new supply— and after that, the old jar gives not one more drop. Corrie tries to explain it away, and her sister says, “Honey, just let it be the gift of God.” (Paraphrased!)
I have my own minor miracle story. A few years ago, within 24 hours of arriving in Napa Valley for a much-needed 5-day time away with my husband to celebrate our anniversary, I got into poison oak. We were hiking and sweaty, and the oil went… ev.er.y.where. But I didn’t know it until I woke up in the middle of the night itching in the middle of my back. Within an hour my whole body was on fire.
Poison ivy and I have a long and unpleasant history—at that time I’d had two really major rounds of it in my life, the kind that require steroids, the kind that make police officers think you’re a battered woman. (I’ve since had a third.) So I knew what I was in for.
By morning light, the damage was visible. This was far and away the worst case I’ve ever had, covering more than 50% of my body. I was red and swollen and I could not focus on anything at all, other than my misery.
We changed the bed, washed the laundry, and found Tecnu scrub, which my husband gamely applied where I couldn’t reach, despite the risk to himself. Still, it was terrible. At the end of the day spent unable to enjoy wine tastings and unable to even kiss my husband, I sat gingerly down on the side of the bed and prayed, “God, I know this is a big ask, and one anniversary trip really isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. And I also know this isn’t how poison ivy works. But we really need this time together. Would you please, please take this away overnight? It would rock my world, God.”
The next morning, I wasn’t 100% poison oak-free… but I was about 90%!
So I do believe miracles can happen.
But I have to admit, I’ve struggled a long time with that whole Red Sea thing. That’s the one I most wanted explained.
Then, a few years ago, my uncle sent a picture of a man standing on dry land— or at least, muddy sand— far from shore in Florida, beside a boat that had been grounded. A hurricane was coming, and the intensity of the changing air pressure had, in defiance of gravity, of surface tension, sucked the water out to sea. Current Googling yields the term “reverse surge.”
Of course, when the hurricane came, the water came rushing back.
That image, of the man with his stranded boat—stranded not by high waters, but by low ones-- hit me like a God-dart in the heart. It said:
Oh, yeah. God CAN make the waters recede, so that people can walk on dry land under it.
Yes, we live in a world controlled by physical, scientific forces. But that world and those forces were put into place by God.
There’s wonder everywhere at the macro level— in the grandeur of mountains, the color of clouds at sunrise and sunset, the power and beauty of a waterfall.
And there’s wonder in the tiny— the feel of a baby’s skin, the unfurling of flower petals, the smell of leaves decomposing (how can death smell so divine?), the whorls in a cross-section of a tree, or even the way a cut tree stump can look for all the world like a cityscape.
God is everywhere.
Everywhere there is good, everywhere there is beauty, everywhere there is wonder, there is God.
Let every heart prepare him room.