Countdown to Kenya - Day Six

Praise God! For He provides all of our blessings.

I have been struggling to translate into words this feeling of inner completeness that I've been experiencing since last week. It flows, in part, out of my discussion on the faith of the disciples on the boat and Jesus's suggestion that they should have just calmed the waves themselves. I realize that that's just my interpretation, but I have found it to be a profound interpretation. I've spent the last week trying to figure out how to calm the waves.

Clearly the Bible is filled with God's miracles. In fact, you might say the entire book from cover to cover is just one long miracle. That the awesome and majestic creator of ALL things should want to have a personal relationship with me is pretty darn miraculous. Heck, I know plenty of people here on Earth that don't want to even give me the time of day. Some of that, maybe, I deserve. And that's the point. If I deserve being ignored by people here, imagine what I deserve in my relationship with God. And yet, He still wants to have this relationship with me - with all of us! That's pretty miraculous.

Understanding that calming the waves would be a miracle, however, doesn't tell me how to do it. Is there a certain flick of the wrist? A tone of the voice? Do I hold up a staff or bang it down on the boat and cry, "You SHALL NOT storm!" in my best Gandalf voice? See, that's part of the problem. My idea of miracles is shaped by Hollywood, and Hollywood's idea of a miracle is that SOMEONE has to do them - thus lending the power of the miracle to the person and not to the actual miracle. You don't get Danny DeVito to part the Red Sea, you get Charlton Heston. But I'm guessing Moses was probably closer to DeVito than to Heston.

So in my best producer like way, I decided to break down the problem one step at a time and I started with a relatively "simple" miracle - God's granting of a son to Abraham, despite his advanced age. I pictured this old man with his old wife (something like the happy couple at the beginning of UP) who have had one break after another and just haven't had a child yet. And God tells them that they will have a child. Abraham must have been thinking, "You're crazy!" but he just nodded and accepted that God could do anything He wanted.

How does the miracle work then? Is it simply faith? Did Abraham believe it would happen, so it did? No. There is no trigger. There is no formula. There are no magic words to make miracles happen, because a miracle is not magic.

When I was a kid and I got in trouble and I knew that I was going to be beaten within an inch of my life, I always found it to be a miracle when my parents would console me instead and treat me with love. In fact, any time where I was certain something bad would happen and instead it turned into something good, something beyond what I could have ever hoped for because it defied everything I knew to be possible, I chalked that up as a miracle.

Abraham and Sarah had a son, Isaac, beyond all their expectations in their old age because God granted them a child. God created the child for them, like He creates all children, out of love. It was a miracle that they had a child at such an advanced age - but the miracle was not in the creation of the child, the miracle was in the gift that they received from God. All such gifts show us that God loves us enough to personally intervene on our behalf. All such interventions are called miracles. Miracles are love just as God is love.

If I were a kid living day by day wondering if I was going to eat that day, struggling to survive in a hot and dusty slum in Kenya, dealing with all the terrible conditions there and not knowing any other existence, it would be a miracle if someone from the other side of the world who had never met me were to just show up one day and feed me, clothe me, and send me to school. This would be a miracle because I would have no expectation that people from half the world away would show such love to me. This would be a miracle because such a thing could not happen without God showing His love to me. There would be no magic words to make this happen. No special hand movements. No dance or song or anything I could do to make it happen. Impossible for me, but for God, its simply showing His love.

That is how I can calm the storm - with love.