When You Have Just Witnessed a Miracle

“We have just witnessed a miracle.”  House silent. The one who placed this endless circle on my finger twenty-two years ago, stares up with me at the draping canopy from our king sized bed.

“I know.” He whispers back. The kids just placed in bed.

And while some miracles must be hunted down, dug up, searched for among the confusion of a crowd stealing hope and bent on logical explanations for it all…

The transformation of our toddler holds us captive.  Silencing us in awe, until even the most cynical critic would lay frozen here with us…speechless at what a good God we serve.

And oh how I have stormed heaven, shaken the cloak of God like the poor women begging for crumbs from a much less evil taskmaster….hoping to move time, change lives, and turn a world upside-down with the love of a Father that can seem just too far away…

But I wonder if real power comes not from the gripping and clawing, from claiming and dictating all of who we are and what we want to “The Man upstairs” unseen.  Maybe the fullness of Him is found in our de-flating, life abandoning, possession-less laying-it-down….the kind that calls us to walk in obedience, allowing an empowering God to rule over the entirety of our hearts as a per-requisit.

A place where love truly does cover over every sin.  A place where patience washes out the need to rule and reign in a kingdom of far too many gods…and just not enough servants.

And what if….miracles are less about what we see…and more about how we love?  Less about what we say, and more about how God rules in our hearts, and minds, and lives…each and every second of every day?

And oh how isolation can poison us with fearful lies.  Lies that tell us, “the whole world is scary”, lies that torment us with, “I don’t need or don’t want anyone near me”…

But, what if the answer was in the pressing into people. Abandoning ourselves to a God and not caring about a passing fad or any human regulations….What if the answer is in the “love until it hurts”

…and even then, letting not anything…not offense, bitterness, pain, abuse…anything…keep us from loving more.

Because love eternal has no ending…

What if, each one of us; each orphan, each child, each old person….all of us…had one person in the world that really believed in us and wouldn’t let go?

Might miracles be unstoppable?  Might stumbling blocks, and isolation, and addictions be unheard of? 

My eight year is old is drawn to Esther.  The story of an orphan, who God raised and lifted to be a queen of Israel…

And in a day of profiling, and pivoting, social climbing, and media significance…to think that God could take a nobody and make them somebody, He could take a parent-less child….and make them a queen, like Esther, who would deliver an entire nation…. 

Yes, sometimes our visions can mistakenly make us the center…not God.  And our hopes can be far off from what God esteems as worthy and significant.

And at the end of the day, maybe the Miracle is in the Surrendering.

Yet, people strive an entire lifetime to be something, anything…but end up miserable, lonely, disappointed.
Clocks tick and globes rotate on their axis…and I don’t want to miss it.  Miss the reality that more often miracles aren’t found in the insistence.  The biggest, greatest, most eternal, life-changing miracles are found in the quiet hearts, the most humblest of places.

A soul saved.  A life changed. That is a miracle that surpasses any earthly glory.

So, what is it that makes a miracle?  The kind where foster kids left and abandoned can grow to believe and trust in a world where the sun always rises…even when we don’t see it?

What causes the broken to start learning…though so many have failed them? The crippled to start standing and walking, when the bruises from their attempting still shine scars tauntingly reminding them of yesterday?

And yet, slivers of grace can be found in the most unusual places. And any True Resurrection necessitates the fully complete death of one accepting the fact that His plans are better than our own.

One writes on Facebook.  Others tell us how our foster daughter looks and acts completely different from just two months.

I want to give them some explanation for a redemption that has astonished all of us.  Some hope or five steps how a year of turmoil could just radically drift from the life of one who used to rock back and forth traumatized over and over again, fearful of any human touch at all.

But, at the end of the day….Miracles aren’t earned, or won, or bought, or understandable.  Miracles are sprinkles of grace that come down from a Father, the same God who took an orphan like Esther and made her a queen.

And though we rocked and loved, and cared for this little one…we stare at the ceiling, sit back in awe in the quiet of our humble home, exclaiming in awe at the God of all love….

“We have just witnessed a miracle.”

(Linking with Tracy)