I've been thinking a little bit about miracles today. Not, in fact, the whizz bang Christmas kind - the virgin birth, for example - but just the ordinary ones, if that's not a contradiction in terms!
I mean the kind that creep up unnoticed, that we only fully recognised with benefit of hindsight. I'm thinking of the conversations I have that I later realise would have been an impossibility a matter of weeks before, of circumstances that appear insurmountable which seem to resolve themselves without any effort on my part, the glimpses of hope which so easily pass us by.
But I find that thinking about miracles can quickly take me down a darker path. My problem is not that I don't believe that God can do miracles; my problem is that I'm certain that he can.
I know I'm not alone in struggling with the next logical step - the reality that while God could act, he rarely does. I struggle to take comfort from the story of Job, from his exchange with God in which he's bomdarded with rhetorical question after rhetorical question designed to leave him in no doubt as to God's sovereignty and omnipotence. In the last few years my biggest fights with God have come not as a result of doubting he exists, but precisely because I'm convinced he does.
Sometimes belief is far more painful than doubt.
No comments:
Post a Comment