Thank you to the women at Ishshah’s Story for inviting me to contribute to their team. I am honoured to be a part of a beautiful group of time-tested Jesus followers.
This week’s blog: Dyin’ With an Astronaut: When There is More to the Story
Tag: miracles
Days of Preparation
The horse is prepared for the day of battle,
but the victory belongs to the Lord.
(Proverbs 21:31 NLT)
This morning Facebook reminded me of an old post I wrote when my granddaughter was about three years old. I enjoyed her ability to give directions around her city when I was babysitting for a few days.
“Go past the tower (tall building) and wait for the green light. Then turn and go past Costco and there it is – Walmart!”
This amused me, so when we needed groceries after her swimming lessons I asked for directions to Superstore.
“Nana, have you been to Superstore before?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Then look into your memory and you can find the way there all by yourself.”
Today I face another battle where the odds are seemingly against me. I’m doing much better at avoiding panic this time, but I needed this prompt to remind me to look into my memory and acknowledge the times when we did all we could – and it was not enough. But God took what ever preparations we made and did something greater than we ever could have imagined.
Resting in the Lord is not about passively flopping on the ground and awaiting rescue. We pick up our five smooth stones, gather as many empty vessels as we can, prepare a sacrifice on an altar, stand before Pharaoh’s armies with nothing but a stick, march around a city seven times, pick up our beds, walk all the way to Damascus to pray for a guy who wants to kill us. We make preparations, we prepare the horse for the day of battle (again), but we know that the victory belongs to the Lord.
That’s resting in the Lord too.
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One Generation After Another
I will lift my praise above everything to You, my God and King!
I will continually bless Your name forever and always.
My praise will never cease—
I will praise You every day;
I will lift up Your name forever.
The Eternal is great and deserves endless praise;
His greatness knows no limit, recognizes no boundary.
No one can measure or comprehend His magnificence.
One generation after another will celebrate Your great works;
they will pass on the story of Your powerful acts to their children.
Your majesty and glorious splendor have captivated me;
I will meditate on Your wonders, sing songs of Your worth.
We confess—there is nothing greater than You, God,
nothing mightier than Your awesome works.
I will tell of Your greatness as long as I have breath.
The news of Your rich goodness is no secret—
Your people love to recall it
and sing songs of joy to celebrate Your righteousness.
Psalm 145
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Tell the Story
The stories of God’s provision in our parents’ and grandparents’ lives are a precious inheritance. In the same way our stories not only build faith for our own journey, as we recall them, they also build a foundation of faith for our children and for their children and for future generations.
My grandchildren ask for stories about their parents, about their grandparents and especially about themselves as babies. I tell them stories when we walk in the woods, when we travel together, when we get ready for bed. They especially want to hear the stories about miracles, about escapes from danger, about noble deeds and about the way God brought everything together to give them life and this precious moment right here, right now.
Do you have a story to tell of God stepping in to your own history?
Has he rescued you, healed you, or freed you from addictions?
Has He spoken to you through a song or an angel or left a gem on your bed?
Has a promise in the Bible caught your attention like a beacon in the dark?
Have you heard his voice in the shower or in the truck or had a dream that came true?
Have you experienced a co-incidence that is too much of a co-incidence to be a co-incidence?
Have you found your soul mate or a loyal friend or the child you were meant to adopt?
Have you walked a hard road and found that God’s grace did keep you and did get you through the valley?
Stories about God are not just for children but for anyone with ears to hear.
Would you tell me about it? I would love to hear.
I’ve told a lot of my stories here, how my paternal grandfather saw Jesus in the barn, how my maternal grandparents were late and missed their boat – the Titanic, how I found my lost keys deep in the forest, how God lifted depression, how I heard Him speak through a bicycle shop advertisement and a dancing prairie chicken, how God did a miracle in our son-in-law’s body and in a lot of other people’s hearts after he was given a 0% chance of surviving flesh-eating disease…
Now it’s your turn. What’s your God story? Just write in the comment box on the bottom. (You may need to click on “leave a comment” under the title first.)
Tell your story.
Listen, dear friends, to God’s truth,
bend your ears to what I tell you.
I’m chewing on the morsel of a proverb;
I’ll let you in on the sweet old truths,
Stories we heard from our fathers,
counsel we learned at our mother’s knee.
We’re not keeping this to ourselves,
we’re passing it along to the next generation—
God’s fame and fortune,
the marvelous things he has done.
He planted a witness in Jacob,
set his Word firmly in Israel,
Then commanded our parents
to teach it to their children
So the next generation would know,
and all the generations to come—
Know the truth and tell the stories
so their children can trust in God.
(Psalm 78 The Message)
A story worth telling: https://charispsallo.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/i-want-my-daddy/
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Victory and Suffering: Both
I have often felt I’ve been in the awkward position of having to choose between being with those who pursue a life of victory in Christ or those who glory in suffering.
My life verse has been, “…that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection…” The problem is that I cannot ignore the next part: “and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:10-11)
Victory, yes, but suffering…
I came across this video by Ryan Matchett (one of the pastors at River of Life Church in Lethbridge, Alberta) talking about this problem. It’s about realizing the purpose and value of suffering without getting stuck there.
Thomas believed in Jesus enough to be willing to die with him. His doubt was about his difficulty transitioning from a willingness to suffer with Jesus to a willingness to also share in his resurrection. “When we don’t believe in resurrection in the midst of suffering we make agreement with death.”
This is well worth the 38 minutes of listening time.
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I Want My Daddy!
What do you do when God gives you a real live miracle?
First, you respond with thankfulness. Then you look toward the One the sign points to. Asking Him why we received a miracle brings as silent a response as asking why there have been times when we did not see a loved one healed. A better question is “What?”
“What would you have us do with this experience?”
“What does this mean?”
“What are you showing us about yourself?”
Or “How would you have us respond?” ”
My job during the crisis was mainly to care for the children. We knew people were praying and most of the time felt a cocoon of love around us, but to be honest there were times when this little boy in the photo felt the agony of not having his Daddy there with him, of not knowing why somber adults spoke in hushed voices or stopped talking when they noticed him playing at their feet or hiding behind the door. There were times when he cried inconsolably, “I want my Daddy! Where is my Daddy? I need my Daddy!” and no one, not uncles or grandmothers or even Mommy could comfort him. There were times when he refused to eat or sleep and trashed his room late at night when grown-ups insisted he go to bed.
Then there were times when he was the one with the strongest faith, when he sat on Mommy’s lap and looked into her eyes and said, “We don’t hass to be afraid, Mommy. We don’t hass to be afraid cuz Jesus is wiss us.” When doctors privately gave his Daddy a 0% chance of recovery from necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease) he and his sister set aside drawings and pine cones and other precious things to show Daddy when he came home. They sang songs about nothing being impossible for Jesus.
What do you do when God gives you a real live miracle? What you do with a miracle is tell the story truthfully, including the times of outrageous faith, and the times of soul-crushing disappointment. I appreciate our son-in-love Bruce and daughter Lara Merz’ efforts to be accurate when they tell the story of their miracle in the book While He Lay Dying. They are honest about their struggles, their fears. their set-backs. They are honest about surges of faith that came from beyond themselves. They are honest about the difficulty of pursuing being a community of love and being transparently vulnerable in times of crisis. They are honest about the way God accomplished the very tasks Bruce had once strived to accomplish, by bringing them about while he lay in bed doing absolutely nothing. At all. He couldn’t even breathe for himself.
One of the contributors to the book is a fine physician who witnessed the roller-coaster ride that this event entailed. He volunteered to verify the chronology and medical information and write a chapter from his perspective. Their pastor gives his story of how the event led to greater revelation for him and its significance for the larger church, and Bruce and Lara’s little daughter also expresses her point of view.
What do you do when God gives you a real live miracle? You stand up, relinquish your rights to life as you have known it and say, “This is what we saw. This is what God did. This is Who He is to us.” You become a witness to His goodness. You give him all the glory for the things He has done.
Last week I heard this little guy giggling as his Daddy tucked him into bed. God heard his cry. Daddy came home without any loss of limbs and with organs functioning better than before he becme ill.
This week the book telling this amazing story of how the Lord gathered an army of believers to pray for the life of one man and support one little family has been released. I think you’ll find it inspiring.
The website:
http://whilehelaydying.com/#
Book available from:
Amazon in both print and eBook form. (A free Kindle download is available for reading eBooks on computers and other devices.) Click on one of these:
Kobo (eBook)
Indigo/Chapters with free shipping until Dec. 15
Essence Publishers (print)
Your local bookstore by request
Profits beyond expenses related to book to go to charity.
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Suspension or Restoration
“We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus’ miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.”
— Timothy Keller
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Angels Help Us to Adore Him
I’ve never seen an actual angel, not that I know of, at least not while I was awake. I know people who have – and some of them are the scientifically-oriented type who are not given to flights of fancy. I gather it’s a rather startling experience.
I’ve sung about them quite often.
Angels, help us to adore Him,
Ye behold Him face to face;
Sun and moon, bow down before Him;
Dwellers all in time and space,
Praise Him, praise Him, alleluia!
Praise with us the God of grace.
(from Praise My Soul the King of Heaven by Henry Lyte)
I’ve read about them too, but like most folk the pictures of angels I’ve been acquainted with came from Christmas decorations, Baroque paintings, corner gift shops and carved stones in cemeteries.
I’ve seen them in dreams though. One leaned down low and told me a secret that explained a lot of previously unexplained events in my childhood. In another dream, after I had been praying about what action to take in a puzzling situation, I saw an angel pointing to the trail I often walk on when I go to pray. He was leaning on the please-clean-up-after-your-dog sign and smiling.
In my dreams I have seen angels in uniform in my dreams. One was in a Canadian Army dress uniform, some wore battle fatigues while driving supply vehicles, friendly waving angels in air force uniforms deplaned from a passenger jet landing near my house, and one was dressed as a cable guy. He was in my house repairing something in the wall where my husband and the boys had once threaded a wire that connected their computers so they could play games together. Shortly after that I noticed a definite improvement in communication in their relationship.
When I hear people’s stories of real live encounters I become envious. I have sincerely prayed for my eyes to be opened like Elisha’s servant so I could see too, but every time I have done that someone close to me sees something, and I don’t.
When our son-in-law lay dying several people told me about seeing angels around him. One praying friend in another part of the world sent a message telling me about the angel she saw in a vision. Within a few hours I heard two other people who were there at the hospital describe seeing exactly the same thing. Some people saw two very tall angels on guard duty on either side of the door to his room. Some saw angels crowded in the room and hallways. Some saw angels holding his head.
He didn’t die. He was miraculously healed.
Just before that particularly trying season, when the doctor thought I had cancer, then my mother-in-law was in ICU for heart problems, followed by our son-in-law’s battle with sepsis from flesh-eating disease, and when our son’s family’s home and community was nearly destroyed in a flood, had I prayed to see angels. I didn’t. My husband did though. He’s really a down-to-earth guy, a scientist, but he told me excitedly the next morning that he dreamed (or he thought it was a dream) that he answered a knock on the door and a bunch of very big angels walked past him into the living room. He said they all dressed and acted like rugby players. Big tough rowdy guys.
“What did they look like?” I demanded. “Did you see their faces? Did they have names?”
“There was a whole team of giant nine-foot tall rugby player angels crammed into our little eight foot high living room! It was really hard to see anything. All I know is that they were slapping each other on the back enthusiastically like they were really looking forward to playing a big important game. They were like ‘Bring it on! We are so ready for this!’”
Maybe I haven’t seen angels because I might be so distracted I would forget to do my part in the battle, which seems a lot like pulling out little Lucy’s tiny dagger in the presence of a whole huge army of threats and ugly hatred like she did in a battle in Narnia.
The Bible talks freely about angels, and how they are servants of God. They are not made of stone or paper or cookie dough and they aren’t chubby babies with aerodynamically impossible tiny wings. We don’t worship them, but it’s good to know the angels who worship the Creator of the Universe and see him face to face help us fight the good fight. I trust the Lord sends them where he needs them – and where I need them when I pull out my little dagger.
There are more accounts of angel sightings in the book, While He Lay Dying.
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We Could Ask the Flowers
I still had some flowers in the garden on Sunday, but by Wednesday the blossoms bowed under the snow — frozen solid. I hate to see the flowers die. I grieve for them every autumn.
My granddaughter, a few weeks before her fourth birthday, made a profound observation about the flowers dying. It was profound, because only a few weeks later her Daddy lay dying.
This is what her Mommy wrote:
Every time I left Bruce, I felt like I left half of me at the hospital. It felt wrong to leave him, like my being there would somehow make all the difference, but every time I was at the hospital, I felt like I should be at home with my children, making life feel as normal as possible, playing and laughing so they wouldn’t have to be worried about Daddy. No matter where I was, I didn’t feel like I was in the right place…
My kids never knew the severity of what was going on. At two months, two-and-a-half years, and barely four years old, I didn’t think it would be good for them to know that Daddy could die.
I recalled a conversation Keziah and I had shared not long after baby Vivia was born. A warm chinook wind had peeled back the blanket of snow in the park, and we were able to get outside for a little stroll. As we walked past an old flower bed, she looked up at me and said, “We don’t know what it feels like to be dead. That’s a’cause we’ve never been dead before so we don’t know how it feels.”
She looked at me for agreement. I nodded.
She went on, “And if you’re dead, then you’re dead and you can’t tell anyone a’cause you’re dead.”
She paused and thought about it for a few minutes, while shuffling her heavy winter boots down the sidewalk.
“But maybe we could ask the flowers a’cause they die every winter so they know how it feels…Too bad they don’t have mouths, or they would prolly tell us!”
I remember thinking at the time, What three-year old thinks about death? And now I wondered, What three-year old thinks about being raised from something that looks like death?
-from While He Lay Dying by Bruce and Lara Merz (available here)
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Eyes to See
“Arthur: If I asked you where the hell we were, would I regret it?
Ford: We’re safe.
Arthur: Oh good.
Ford: We’re in a small galley cabin in one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet.
Arthur: Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word safe that I wasn’t previously aware of.”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I was telling someone about an event I considered to be a miracle (in which a man who was given a 0% chance of survival walked out of the hospital perfectly whole shortly after). Her response was, “Sometimes I think we give God too much credit. There is probably an explanation somewhere; we just don’t understand it yet.”
I expect some people to say, “Prove it.” Most of the time that phrase, being interpreted, means, “I have already decided you are either lying or delusional.” Any documentation provided is either then ignored or dismissed. It’s amusing in a sad sort of way when they go on to announce “There is no documentation…” I don’t try to convince them. Not my job. I just thank God and enjoy him. The question, “How can that be?” young Mary’s question (upon being informed that she, a virgin, was about to have a child) asking for understanding, has greater integrity.
Another person said, “Oh, the guy was just healed (as if that wasn’t impressive enough.) A miracle would be if an amputee received a new limb.”
This made me think. Was I giving God credit for a miracle when he only did a speeded-up supernatural version of natural healing?
Researching this made me realize I had accepted a strange use of the word miracle given by someone who, in fact, did not believe in miracles. It was an assumed definition I had absorbed somewhere or other in my education. Then I learned that the Bible itself defined such events quite differently.
The etymology (historic root) of the word miracle comes from the Latin word for wonder.
The New Testament uses these words to describe “miraculous” events: dunameis (displays of power or authority) simeion (signs or portents) teras (a wonder or unusual occurrence) paradoxa (unexpected) and thaunasion (a marvel or astonishing thing.) Or something close to those translations. Many concepts do not cross language barriers easily.
The definition of miracle that I had grown up with was something that could be proven to defy the laws of physics.
The people Jesus walked among would have been puzzled at our strange use of the word. N.T. Wright, as he often does, brought my attention to the need to understand the concept in the culture and times in which the Bible was written.
“These words do not carry, as the English word ‘miracle’ has sometimes done, overtones of invasion from another world, or outer space. They indicate, rather, that something has happened, within what we would call the ‘natural’ world, which is not what would have been anticipated, and which seems to provide evidence for the active presence of an authority, a power, at work, not invading the created order as an alien force, but rather enabling it to be more truly itself.’
‘The word ‘miracle’, by contrast, has come to be associated with two quite different questions, developed not least in the period of the Enlightenment: (a) is there a ‘supernatural’ dimension to our world? (b) Which religion, if any, is the true one? ‘Miracles’ became, for some, a way of answering ‘yes’ to the first and ‘Christianity’ to the second. Jesus’ ‘miracles’ are, in this scheme, a ‘proof’ that there is a god, who has ‘intervened’ in the world in this way. Hume and his followers, as we saw, put it the other way around: granted that ‘miracles’ do not occur, or at least cannot be demonstrated to occur, does this mean that all religions, including Christianity, are false, and the Bible untrue?” (N.T. Wright, ‘Jesus and the Victory of God’, p.186-188)
When I use the word miracle now I mean seeing God at work in unusual, unexpected, marvelous, astonishing displays of power and authority that point to Who He is. A miracle may defy the laws of physics by making the sun stand still or parting a body of water or turning water into wine, but it may also be a series of crazy astonishing coincidences – or a man walking out of the hospital against all expert expectation.
The “supernatural” is no more unnatural than natural to God and to those familiar with His ways, those learning to see with the eyes to see and hearing with the ears to hear that Jesus talked about.
And no. I don’t think we can ever give God too much credit for the unusual, unexpected, marvelous, astonishing things He has done, however He chooses to do them.
To God be the glory!
Charis: Subject to Change 