Here's the story behind our new essay on miraculous healing by Faith Today senior writer Alex Newman
Miracle is a word applied to so much these days – found keys, restored relationships, favourite sports team win – that it’s lost its power. Even secular friends use the term, which I find odd considering our cultural distaste for any notion of divine intervention. It’s a kind of wish fulfilment that some exterior entity has the power to make challenges disappear and restore our lives to order. And control.
I have my own examples. Like the great-grandfather who was healed in 1908 of a “stomach ailment” at Toronto’s Danforth Gospel Hall. He closed his law practice and started preaching at the corner of Yonge and Dundas for the next 12 years until succumbing to cancer.
And closer to home, the birth of my daughter. It could be said all births are miraculous, but some have the touch of God on them, as we say in modern vernacular, a “God thing.”
But was she really a miracle? I decided to investigate – by pitching a story to Faith Today and doing the hard research.
After my son was born, I experienced years of miscarriage and general infertility (yes, my name Alex is short for Alexandra). Increasingly angry with God, and resentful of every pregnant woman around me, I underwent treatments – even hypnosis once – while ignoring the signs my marriage was unravelling.
Imagine my surprise five years later, when a pregnancy test revealed two blue lines. More so, since it happened right when my husband said he was leaving. Seriously, Lord? You choose now when I’m on the brink of divorce with an unstable income, and a preschooler?
My marriage counsellor, though, was thrilled and immediately filled out a prescription for hormone shots.
That baby is now 25, and I frequently remind her she’s a miracle. But after researching this article, I’m not sure the term applies. Maybe the earlier fertility treatments kickstarted my system, or maybe the hormone shots made the pregnancy stick. After all no bush burst into flames, or seas parted to allow safe passage, or large jars of water filled with Chateau-Lafite-quality wine.
However, what became clear as I reflected on miracles and their definition was that these occurrences – and the interpretations we apply to them -- are just the thing to keep us clinging to what is often a fragile faith. For me, that pregnancy – in spite of the potentially devastating circumstances – was God’s way of saying, “I am here, I have heard your heart’s desire. And more importantly, I want this baby to live.”
For even when apparently miraculous events are a stretch scientifically or theologically, they often serve to affirm our faith in God’s presence.
These are also the miracles Lee Strobel calls circumstantial in his book The Case for Miracles. As he notes, these occurrences can feed our faith as we plod along, peering at the sky, wondering when God will show up. And then He does, and even if it’s our faulty human interpretation, it is enough to keep us going through those frequent dry periods.
Of course, broadly speaking, everything is miracle – the creation of the world and each of us, the Incarnation, the resurrection. There’s the miracle of our faith communities, how the Spirit works in and through us to shore each other up through tough times.
When interviewing Professor David Reed, I asked him what he thinks constitutes a miracle. He told me about being run over by a truck as a kid and escaping death because the wheels rolled by on either side and the undercarriage was high enough to not touch him.
“I will never know if that was God’s hand or not,” he said. “It takes the eyes of faith to see a miracle, and even when it’s not strictly speaking a miracle, it somehow reinforces that faith.”