A Short Meditation on Miracles

from a non-theologian believer

Many of us who live with chronic disease or chronic pain pray for a miracle to help us. Even more fervent are the prayers offered by those who face death and pray for deliverance.

Miracles are slippery to define. Sometimes, one person’s miracle is another one’s junked piano. A while after my first son, Max, was born and while I was continuing to emotionally process the magnitude of what his hemophilia diagnosis meant, I attended a Sunday school class containing parents that had children his age. For some reason, I thought that it was a good idea. The teacher asked if there were any good news to report. The fellow beside me said that he had prayed for a piano and that God had provided him one. He declared it a miracle even though he had to retrieve it from someone’s driveway where it had sat outside in the rain for a week. Was it a proper miracle? I don’t know. Maybe he requested a piano with a watery sound. This exchange came to mind in the days that followed Max’s death.

On a Sunday afternoon almost 20 years ago, I prayed desperately for God to spare the life of Max, as I watched the crash team work to revive him. I called upon God to spare him as he spared Isaac but to no avail. No angels. No sacrificial ram. Just silence . . . interrupted by the sounds of failed resuscitation. Max died in front of me from an undetected internal bleeding episode - a not-so-rare occurrence for a boy with hemophilia as I learned belatedly from a shocked doctor.

My son’s death was not the first miracle I had prayed for. As a teenager, I prayed, along with many others, for God to heal my dad from whatever was wrong with him. I did not realized that the antipsychotic medications prescribed to him by several well-meaning psychiatrists were just wrong. When my dad first started having problems with “imaginary” back pain (rigidity) and nerve tingling (neuropathy) in his early 40’s, young-onset Parkinson’s Disease was not yet a recognized diagnosis. Parkinson’s was a diagnosis for old men who shuffled around nursing homes; not for a middle-aged man in his prime.

Maybe if he had been referred to a neurologist, we all could have avoided his eventual suicide 25 years later. During those years, my mother, siblings, and I endured his long-descent towards death. We struggled along with him through misdiagnoses of schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, not to mention the residual addiction to prescription pain medication. Suicide threats became commonplace, as did the extended stays in mental hospitals and rehab centers while we watched his financial assets drain away.

I received my own young-onset Parkinson’s diagnosis within months of my second son’s birth and my first son’s death. I was too overwhelmed with the loss of Max for the news of my diagnosis to bother me. I didn’t have the emotional energy to even hope for a miracle, yet I endured through God’s strength and mercy. Endurance may be the ultimate passive miracle.

During the recent Lenten and Easter seasons of the church calendar many of us meditated upon the last few days of Christ. We read in the scriptures how the crowds, clerics, and political leaders all wanted to see him perform a miracle. Jesus knew that he had already performed more than enough miracles to make them almost commonplace. Herod and his cronies were a tough crowd. Even the home team crowd turned into a tough crowd. They were either going to believe or they were not regardless of any miracles.

I no longer pray for miracles as such. If God remained silent when his own Son cried out, why should I expect any more or less. I say this, not for a lack of faith, but from pursuing a deeper understanding of faith, gratitude, and the meaning of God’s silence.