We often use the word miracle merely to describe happenings of unexplainable luck or to give credence to happenings that have no physical or logical explanation. Scientists and skeptics tend to debunk the existence of miracles by claiming that things which cannot be explained are merely happenings for which someone has yet to discover an answer. That definition of science is certainly true: the discovery of things that have always existed. Science has little room and no patience for faith and miracles, only for what it can prove.
I cannot help but chuckle when I witness, either on TV or in person, an evolutionist and creationist debating which theory can lay claim to the existence of humans on earth. Each side will espouse its merits of the argument, always leaving each other just a tad bit short of bridging the gap between theory and fact. That gap is why we have the theory of evolution and the theory of creation instead of the ability to explain the true facts of either. In the gap between theory and fact lies something that we know to exist in the natural world but also something that we cannot and never will have the capability to explain in the supernatural world: the miracle.
The miracle of a miracle is the requisite belief that miracles do indeed occur. Most times, belief in miracles arises from personal experiences or witnessing something otherwise inexplicable. Many other times, the belief in miracles merely flows from faith. Regardless, whether from experience, witness, or faith, just believing that miracles can and do occur will have a tremendous impact on one’s perspective.
The author C.S. Lewis once described God’s ability to see the big picture in the context of a sheet of paper. The sheet of paper is our life, which to us appears in only two dimensions: length and width. Within the human two dimensions, we can subdivide the paper in many different ways to illustrate how we could view the flat sheet of paper from a two-dimensional perspective. C.S. Lewis illustrated this subdivision of a flat sheet of paper as containing a series of connected squares, but instead of squares, I would like to use words on a sheet of paper as my two-dimensional illustration.
From the beginning to the end of the sheet of paper are a series of words describing our life’s story, past and present. We know what has transpired and is transpiring in our lives, but the two dimensions limit what we can see of the flat sheet of paper. Similar to the way we read a sheet of paper one word at a time, we also progress through our life’s story one word at a time. We can see today and can remember what we have read in the past, but we must rely on faith and God’s grace for what words of our life’s story we cannot yet read.
God, on the other hand, does not see our life’s story in two dimensions on a sheet of paper as we do, but in a multi-dimensional view where the flat sheet of paper is instead shaped and folded into a geometrical object. In God’s view, our lives are multifaceted with many sides, each side having many possibilities and interconnected around a space in the center. Each of the facets can be multiple combinations of life stories with countless possibilities and outcomes depending on the choices that we make through our two-dimensional journey. We are in the center open space of the geometrical object, moving from side to side depending on our choices or actions, and God is on the outside looking at the entire object with a big picture view of the total sum of the possible outcomes. This view of all facets and outcomes gives God the ability to see forward via the big picture and even to communicate to us sometimes the outcomes of certain decisions or actions before we make a choice.
A miracle in terms of our perspective is the assurance that God can see what lies ahead in the realm of the big picture or what words are yet to be read, beyond our abilities. With that forward vision, God can intercede through the medium of a miracle. Whether or not the miracle will occur, as evidenced in my case, may depend on the decisions that we make to be alert or not, but our possible blindness does not diminish the miracle of a miracle.
