It happens, okay? It does.
Every once in a while (sometimes more often than others, and nobody can predict) God "zaps" someone. He takes an intolerable and hopeless situation, and all of a sudden turns it around: heals someone instantly of crippling osteoarthritis, miraculously gets someone their dream job out of the clear blue sky, drops a place to live into someone's lap.
It does happen.
But it doesn't happen often. More often, He works the slow kind of miracles. No less the miracle than the instant ones - but in slow motion. Years of setting things up, months of preparation, weeks of rehabilitation and hard work, surgery followed by a painful recovery period. Working through people and/or process. Yet the miracle happens, sometimes without us even being aware of it. And then we look around one day, and discover that the landscape has changed inexorably.
Who knew?
We like the instant miracles. We eat them up! They get the most press, get the highest ratings on the Christian talk shows. But the slow ones - the ones that work at a snail's pace in the background unnoticed - these are perhaps the greater miracles because they require even more faith... faith that even though it's slow, it will happen in God's time. Faith that the next right thing will lead to the following right thing, and so on and so forth until the goal that seems so far off today, is within reach.
It's the faith that believes in the slow miracle that I think is the most heroic, the most spectacular - because it must endure the scoffing and the ridicule (or at the very least, the pitying indulgence) of the ones who got their miracle "just like that" (said while snapping their fingers.)
I'm a firm believer in the saying, "God always gives His best to those who leave the choice with Him." (Written by Jim Eliot, missionary, 1927 - 1956)
This includes making peace with the fact that God has the right to say no. For whatever reason, that possibility exists. We ASK. We don't demand. We ask believing - and accept what God decides: fast, slow, or not at all. If the latter, we accept that He has His reasons - and move on.
In the meantime - we're allowed to keep asking.
Every once in a while (sometimes more often than others, and nobody can predict) God "zaps" someone. He takes an intolerable and hopeless situation, and all of a sudden turns it around: heals someone instantly of crippling osteoarthritis, miraculously gets someone their dream job out of the clear blue sky, drops a place to live into someone's lap.
It does happen.
But it doesn't happen often. More often, He works the slow kind of miracles. No less the miracle than the instant ones - but in slow motion. Years of setting things up, months of preparation, weeks of rehabilitation and hard work, surgery followed by a painful recovery period. Working through people and/or process. Yet the miracle happens, sometimes without us even being aware of it. And then we look around one day, and discover that the landscape has changed inexorably.
We like the instant miracles. We eat them up! They get the most press, get the highest ratings on the Christian talk shows. But the slow ones - the ones that work at a snail's pace in the background unnoticed - these are perhaps the greater miracles because they require even more faith... faith that even though it's slow, it will happen in God's time. Faith that the next right thing will lead to the following right thing, and so on and so forth until the goal that seems so far off today, is within reach.
It's the faith that believes in the slow miracle that I think is the most heroic, the most spectacular - because it must endure the scoffing and the ridicule (or at the very least, the pitying indulgence) of the ones who got their miracle "just like that" (said while snapping their fingers.)
I'm a firm believer in the saying, "God always gives His best to those who leave the choice with Him." (Written by Jim Eliot, missionary, 1927 - 1956)
This includes making peace with the fact that God has the right to say no. For whatever reason, that possibility exists. We ASK. We don't demand. We ask believing - and accept what God decides: fast, slow, or not at all. If the latter, we accept that He has His reasons - and move on.
In the meantime - we're allowed to keep asking.
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