Believing in Miracles

I sat in the worn wooden pew, the middle of the seats worn lighter, from so many hours of sitting, over years and years. The percentage rate of sitting compared to kneeling or standing, being so much higher. Maybe 75% sitting, 20% standing (especially for songs), and then only 5% kneeling, (because it’s so hard, and your butt catches the edge of the pew). So many prayers, and chanting Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers and the Profession of Faith, recited out loud, from these pews, to the God in the front, the Christ on the cross, little droplets of blood on the hands and feet, and dripping like sweat from under the crown of thorns on his head. Poor Jesus. Poor me, my eye had been cut by a paper pamphlet at the State Fair, a paper cut on my cornea and it hurt, badly. In that moment, eye stinging under the patch, I decided I must have enough faith for a miracle. I felt worried about testing God, but I so wanted my eye to stop hurting, and I so wanted a miracle, too. I prayed, "Dear God heal my eye." Prayed this over and over and believed that the pain was stopping, was going to stop, would stop any minute now.

I sat there on the worn pew, that day, a child of 9 or 10 and prayed. As much as I wanted my eye to not hurt, I alsoI wanted my faith to be real, I wanted it to manifest into something tangible, something that felt more than the unease and uncertainty I always felt around God and church things. I wanted to know if God was for real. But putting this to the test, might also reveal, that my faith wasn’t real, wasn’t good enough, or that God just wasn’t going to pay attention to me.

That was the first time I prayed and really believed I might get a miracle. In spite of my eye having to heal on it’s own, a miracle of sorts I see now, I continued to believe and hope for miracles throughout my life, it was my way of reconciling all the things I didn’t know much about, my way of not knowing, shall we say “how things work.” What happened though, is that the more I learned about how things work, is the less I wanted to believe in miracles. And now not believing in miracles makes me somehow feel like I’m cold and mean. Most times, it seems, even to myself, that it is unrealistic to expect people to belly on up to the truth of the fact that God does not intervene in people’s lives if they believe enough, pray hard enough, or gather enough people in their church or on the net to pray with them, hard enough.

But, this I know. Even though I prayed and prayed, and my faith was rock solid, and I lifted my hands in the real born again way during singing at the born again Baptist church, my husband did not ‘come around’ to being able to be a good husband or father. He did not find a ‘real relationship with Jesus,’ and become a ‘godly man,’ born again into accepting all the cultural accoutrements of this particular sort of faith, which stressed a ‘personal’ relationship with Jesus Christ.

Looking back, he was a good enough husband, and is a good enough father, with his shadow stuff hanging over him, he does the best he can. I don’t think I have to forgive him, either, it is enough for me to know, to understand. People say they “just don’t understand,” when things don’t go the way they want them to, well, I understand, and I could explain, but people don’t want to know, they want to have things go their way, and then pray to God to get them to go that way. And if they don’t they can just say, “Not the Lord’s plan.” I don’t know what they do with all that disappointment and anger at the Lord not listening, I really don’t. I just couldn’t take it any more, that’s all.