(Kateri Tekakwitha, First Nations Saint )
All good and fine for the folks of Ancient Palestine, but how about today?
What has happened to miracles?
It's a question that gets posed by quite often, not only by skeptics, and atheists, but also by "true believers"!* (I really can't believe I just used that phrase, but it seems to fit under the circumstances.)
My theory (how's that for mixing science with religion) is that miracles occur far more frequently than any of us realize. The miracle exists with or without attribution. More often than not the miracle simply is not noticed because we are looking for external evidence. All too seldom do we remember to count the internal changes that God manifests within us as miracles. Healing miracles wrought changes within not just the physical body, but also the mind and spirit.
Still, we fail to recognize even the purely physical miracles because we have difficulty tracking the evidence, the chain of events which lead up to the miracle.
Here's a story to illustrate my theory.
The story starts out
"Jake Finkbonner was so close to death after flesh-eating bacteria infected him through a cut on his lip that his parents had last rites performed and were discussing donating the 5-year-old's tiny organs. "It continues on to tell how one person, with amazing faith and perseverance came to his bedside with something of a last ditch intervention. The power of faith in God's desire to see health and wholeness restored to little Jake was the basis of the intervention. After every other effort had been exhausted, one believing community began intercession through a soon to be saint, Kateri, known as Lily of the Mohawks, and a relic of the soon to be saint was brought to the boy where he lay in the hospital, so near to death.
Miracles do occur with far more frequency than we ever acknowledge. In fact, I think miracles are like trees that fall in the woods... their sound is cast with a thunderous bang. But they go unnoticed because no one was near enough to crash site to hear it.
Those miracles may be of many varieties:
- Miracles of the deep wounds from broken relationships becoming places of forgiveness after years of determined resentment.
- Miracles of rescuers being within reach of an accident, and proper treatment being engaged soon enough to revive the fallen, injured or trapped.
- Miracles of addictions being overcome through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Many other too numerous to list can truly be claimed as miracles, and with it thanksgiving and praise to God should ascend to the heights of heaven daily. The most important miracles, for which we rarely stop to give thanks to God, is the very miracle of being loved by God; NO EXCEPTIONS
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*"True believers" are those persons who deeply profess faith in God, and hold fast to the conviction that salvation comes through belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, crucified, died, buried and resurrected. They may be tolerant or not, defensive or not, and from any denomination of the one holy catholic church.
