The Miracle of Being On Time

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Marjorie Kimbrough tells of a girl named Lucy who was on her way home from a day of teaching in Alameda, California, on October 17, 1989. Ordinarily she took the Nimitz Freeway to her home in El Cerrito, but as she was about to enter the freeway ramp she had the distinct impression that she should not continue. Suddenly her car began to shake and so she pulled to a stop believing that she might have had a flat tire. As she got out of her car to inspect the tires, she saw many other motorists doing the same thing.

It was not a flat tire, it was an earthquake and in a moment she heard the deafening roar of the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway. The super road buckled into concrete shards and the entire multilaned bridge collapsed killing forty-two people and trapping and wounding several more. Had Lucy taken the Nimitz she would have doubtlessly died in an earthquake that registered 7.1 on the Richter scale.

The laws of nature were very explicit that October afternoon. There was a law that relates to tectonic plates scraping against each other at Richter 7.1. There was another law that related to the tensile strength of the concrete reinforcing rods that ran through the doomed section of freeway. There were laws relating to gravity and collapsing concrete. Had Lucy outsmarted those laws? Not at all, but she was obedient to an inner voice that brought her an escape from death. This miracle is largely a miracle of timeliness. Lucy escaped injury or death because she was obedient in some mysterious sense to God's timing.

There are times when God does not set aside a law of nature, but allows us instead to beat the clock. I once had a woman in our congregation who was dying of a heart condition that could be remedied only if she could find a suitable donor to supply her a heart. But, alas, no suitable donor could be found. She was finally at death's door and the family had been called in so she could take her farewells of them all. Being pastor, I arrived at the hospital with one of our associate pastors and went in to say a prayer for her as she left the world at hand, performing what Baptists might called last rites. In my prayer for her I asked the Lord to heal her and make her well.

Upon leaving her, the associate pastor who was with me rebuked me sharply saying, "Do you really think it's wise to pray for her healing when this woman is clearly beyond all hope?"

"There is always hope," I replied. "It is a practice of mine always to extend hope. I never leave a sick person without praying for Christ to heal them. Not to pray for a friend is to waver in trust for what we really want God to do for them. Not to ask from God what we really want abandons our faith to dismal acceptance and despair. And you are wrong. Hope is the hallmark of faith. In Christ we are ever to remember the empty tomb and claim the victory: there is always hope!"

That very night, a young man died in an auto accident in a city one hundred miles distant. His heart was flown directly from his thorax to my friend's, and six weeks later she was back in church and in the pulpit giving glory to God for the miracle He had provided her. In her case no law of nature had been suspended; it was a miracle of timing, but a miracle nonetheless. And one in which our whole church exulted.

Of course, we must remember a young man died in a tragedy that plunged his family into unutterable loss, so that a woman in our church could lay claim to a miracle of God. As I said earlier, tragedy and miracle all point to the issue of interpretation. Was the heart transplant a miracle or a tragedy? It depends upon whether you were a recipient or a donor, of course. But, then, the same thing is true of the incident with Moses at the Red Sea. Was this really a miracle of God? It depends upon whether you were an Israeli or an Egyptian. So many lives were lost in Egypt through this act of God that Pharaoh never called it a miracle.

I remember the first church-building program our church endeavored to complete. The program was going poorly because the new building site was virtually a mountain that had to be excavated to make room for the new building. We were a poor little congregation with no money in hand to hire the removal of thousands of tons of earth. It looked like our dream for the project was to be lost to our inability to pay for the removal of our mountain.

Then came the horror of the unstoppable spring rains. The skies opened, swelling the angry rivers to capacity. These storms, coupled with the spring thaw in the mountains, sent the waterways of the plains into spasms of roaring rivers that made vast lakes of our rich farmland in Nebraska and Iowa. The floods devastated not only farms, but earthen dams, railroads, and rural highways and interstates. The damage ran into the millions of dollars.

During these days of misery, the highway commissioner came to me. "We hear you need a lot of earth excavated to make way for a building."

"Yes," I said. "But we'll have to wait till we have money to get it done."

"We'll excavate it for you free," he said, "in exchange for the earth we need to rebuild the devastated roads and bridge approaches in this area. Just show us the earth you want moved and we'll take it all away. It won't cost you a dime."

Our little congregation was exultant. "It is a miracle!" they cried.

"No, not altogether," I said. "For us to have this miracle, hundreds of thousands of acres of good farms and roads had to be destroyed."

It was a miracle that needed a lot of interpretation. But for us it was at least a miracle of timing. God had violated no law of nature but the timing of the great floods was at least favorable to our own small, private agenda.

Timing also played a part on the night of May 25, 2002, when my wife and I were traveling west on I-40 between Ft. Smith, Arkansas, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. We were tired but decided we would try to drive another fifty miles or so before trying to locate a motel room and spend the night. It seemed like we made this decision on the basis of no more than an innocent whim at the time. But shortly after we crossed the Arkansas River Waterway, a tugboat operator lost consciousness and ran his string of barges into the I-40 bridge, dislodging a bridge pier. As a result the bridge collapsed and thirteen people lost their lives. Could it have happened to us? I cannot say for sure, but had we served our first inclination and rested even for ten minutes in Ft. Smith, we might have been counted among the victims. So we gave God great praise for our safety. We were serving a timetable we couldn't have imagined. It was as though God had created another clock for us to follow.

The Mystery That Redeems Us

But we must understand the one great truth that lies at the core of miracles. Putting aside our struggle with biblical miracles or modern ones, positive or negative responses, laws of nature or simple timing, we must remember the grand interpretation for every miracle: We are not alone. We are loved. The predictable world of happenstance has fallen so clearly in our direction that we can only say, "God was here! We cannot doubt that we are loved and that God is on our side."

Miracles remind me that I must be worth something to God, for he can act in unusual and unpredictable ways to liberate me from a life of captivity. Captivity? Yes, for without miracles I remain chained to a great lie: I am all alone in life and there is no God of mighty acts who can liberate me from the laws of nature; I am but a prisoner of the dull routine of my "scientific" days in which the whole human race is held captive.

Miracle: God Set Free of His Own Laws

The philosophers have constantly spoken of Deism as Deus Ex Machina. The Deists state that God-whoever He is, and we can never know for sure-made the world, set up the laws of nature, and then stepped out of it to let His cosmic machine run on its own. We poor mortals have inherited this forsaken machine and are held captive in it. We are prisoners in a scientifically determined world.

Yet deists forever struggle with their own interpretation. It was said that the Marquis de Sade could argue convincingly that everything was chemically determined, even morality. By his reckoning any happenstance was therefore right and just. How odd, then, that during his confinement in Charenton Lunatic Asylum, he complained of "unjust" treatment by his jailers. If all he was was only an aggregate of chemicals, why did he not accept their treatment as logical and live by his philosophy? Why did he spend hours poring over his wife's letters? He took those letters seriously although "according to his own argument, they were just the chemical etchings of an autonomous and absurd universe. Is it possible that de Sade himself was reaching for a why for life?"

Voltaire obviously felt the same when he said it was inconceivable that an infinitely wise God would make natural laws only to violate them. According to Voltaire, when God made natural law, he did so to give us the miracle of predictability. If the sun did not always come up in the East, ours would be a baffling world. Thus natural law itself is a predictable miracle that makes all life possible.

But we know differently. God must be free to supercede His natural law. We would find no meaning in a God who would shut us up in His system and walk away. But God has broken the rigid laws of nature to say, "You matter to me! You are so much more than the system. See, I have broken the inherent stupidity of life. You mean more to me more than the laws of nature in which you see yourself trapped."

Not everything that happens to us can be explained. But we are free not because we have all the answers, but precisely because we don't. The things we cannot explain are the things that teach us we count with God! The mysteries redeem us.

Conclusion

The Governor's Palace in Santa Fe is a building I love to visit. For all its antiquity it is not an ancient building. Made of brown adobe, it is not really an impressive structure. But it was the territorial capital of New Mexico and as such was the governor's "palace" in the territory of New Mexico.

Lew Wallace was once governor of this territory and therefore made his home at the palace. He had long wrangled with the illogical life of Christ. He therefore set about a critical study to examine the miracles and to write a refutation of Jesus, whom he believed was a great historical myth and not the Son of God.

How odd that this Southwestern adobe citadel I love so much should have been the arena of Wallace's early skepticism and later doubt. Within those walls he wrangled on and on over who Jesus was. And the more he studied Christ, the more he became convinced that Christ was the Son of God. And so he was inspired to write his famous novel, Ben Hur. Who can ever forget the rousing passage in which Ben Hur witnesses the healing of his leprous mother and sister.

Fiction?

Yes.

But from where did the fiction rise? Out of the notion that God works in miraculous ways His wonders to perform. Wake up to doubt and your God will be locked in heaven and you will be jailed on earth. But wake to faith, and miracles will thrust themselves each moment into your awareness. God will become for you the God of infinite possibilities.

It is perhaps worthy of note that when Wallace the Agnostic really encountered the Christ, it was the Christ of Miracles and not the Christ of Philosophical Argument. This should not surprise us. The Christ of miracles is the only Christ there is.