No Miracle, Still God

My friend Sheela, an Evangelical Pentecostal from India, wore a t-shirt to our aerobics class that said on the front, "Even though there was no miracle...", and on the back, it said, "He is still God." She bought it from a man who was badly burned all over his body, his face very disfigured. He traveled to different congregations to tell his story. He had prayed for a miracle, for his burns to be completely healed. There was no miracle, he said. And yet he still had faith. He went all over, telling people not to lose heart, to trust God anyway. Live your life in service and love anyway.

I find this remarkable. It contradicts the "Super Jesus" miracle stories - John's line that Jesus waited until Lazarus was dead to come so that he could revive him and more people would believe in him because of a more stupendous miracle. It contradicts decades of traveling faith healer shows that get people to "come to Christ" because people come forward and are healed of their diseases. The blind see, the lame rise up from wheelchairs.

Most of this is trickery, of course. I started calling my column "Leap of Faith" after the movie of that title that came out in the early '90s. Steve Martin was a traveling preacher who duped people out of their money by pretending to work miracles of healing in the crowd. Turns out he had a receiver in his ear, hooked up to Debra Winger, who was spying on the crowd, and giving him tidbits of information, allowing him to miraculously know things about people. The movie turned when there actually was a miracle healing, much to the shock and amazement of Martin & Winger. No one could explain it. But it also forced Martin's character to get close enough to real people who were hoping and trusting him with their lives, and he couldn't go on pretending. He fell in love with a waitress and stayed. That's when he found actual faith - in himself, in other human beings, in goodness - perhaps in God. You had the sense that he now wanted to be worthy of the goodness and trust of the young man he had "healed". To be real.

But it's much more frequent that there is no miracle. At least not in the way we hope.

When I was a student chaplain, we met with a woman in a wheelchair who was a full-time chaplain at the hospital. She said that the miracle healing stories were sometimes tough for people to know what to do with. How fervently, how faithfully they prayed for God to remove their affliction. Let them walk. Let them see. Let their cancer disappear forever. "I believe in Jesus. Why doesn't he heal me?" they ask, and their hearts break. Our job, she said, was to show them that there could be healing, no matter what the state of their bodies. She was proof. As long as there can be life, as long as we can live with purpose, that's healing. That's still a miracle.

It takes people who really believe this, and live it themselves to teach it to us.