'Why I Believe in Miracles'

There is a huge part of me that is really, truly, uneasy with writing about the subject of miracles. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable discussing religion, prayers, or the subject of God. But for a child raised in a quietly Presbyterian household, miracles were the stuff of the Easter sermon or old time religious revival tents with a laying-on of hands. 

 

In my limited childhood experience, the people who threw that term around liberally were the 1-900 Sunday morning cable ministers, many of whom were later snared in the skeins of their own sins.

 

Sort of like the words “awesome” or “unique,” the word miracle is now officially overused.  We seem to slip it into everyday sentences and conversation. “It was a miracle I found you in that crowd,” or “It’s a miracle they have a size six left on the sales rack.”

 

As cheap a verbal currency as the “M” word has become, I know from experience that there are real miracles at work in life.  In talking with others whose lives have been changed by something miraculous, I have come to realize that there exists a kind of “Miracle Club,” swollen with members.

 

Our family’s induction happened on March 6, 2006. My husband Bob had been in a coma for 36 days after being hit by an IED, a bomb buried in the side of an Iraqi road as he covered a story for ABC News.

 

With each passing week of little or no progress, my spirits were beginning to flag, although I remained optimistic on the outside for my four children. After one month, I had begun preparing myself to think about nursing facilities for Bob. He was not waking up, not responding to commands as the doctors had hoped.  He would move in an agitated fashion, stare with blank eyes, but there was no “Bob” there, no bright light behind his eyes.

 

I went to bed on March 5^th at the lowest point in my life.  I had been living apart from my children for five weeks, and I had to face the fact that my loving husband and life partner more closely resembled a helpless child than a man.

 

I said a silent prayer that night to God with a plea to Bob.  “There is nothing more I can do, honey,” I whispered in the hotel room.  “You have to do this yourself now, you have to wake up.  “It’s in your hands and Gods.”

 

Early the next morning, as I walked into Bob’s hospital room, preparing for another day of disappointment, there was my husband, sitting up in bed, his eyes as bright as two candles asking me where I had been.  When I think about the definition of a miracle, I will always remember that moment in freeze frame.  I see the rapture on Bob’s face and I imagine the stunned disbelief, gratitude, and then joy on my own.  It must have been the picture of answered prayers.

 

Now that I’m officially a member of the Miracle Club, I am more keenly attuned to the stories of others, stories I might have written off before.  A friend’s daughter had contracted Lyme disease and the symptoms had gone undiagnosed. She spent years with a horrible auto-immune reaction, finally succumbing to a wheel chair, unable to move, partially paralyzed and almost out of hope. Her body was racked with multiple seizures each day.  Even the process of chewing food would set her into convulsions.

 

The family had taken their daughter to specialists around the country, to shamans, therapists and exorcists. They had tried massage and they’d had legions of friends praying for her recovery. One day someone at their church suggested a prayer circle, a powerful vortex of prayers directed at their daughter like a laser beam. They had nothing to lose.