Slow Miracles

Slow Miracles arrived today.

Slow Miracles is the Father McKenna Center newsletter, but I'd never noticed the title until today.

For most of my life, I have prayed for God's help, for his guidance, for his forgiveness, for his will to be done in my life, in my wife's life, in my kids' lives, in my friends' lives, and in everyone's lives.

This is not an empty statement.  In the mid-1990s - before the internet - I began journaling some of my prayers; so the record goes back a long way.  God knows I haven't lived a perfect life -- far from it.  But he knows that I have tried to live a life of faith.

But a true life of faith is hard to know.   Most of the time, I wonder if I'm on that road or not, so I pray and seek God.  And he knows my heart.

And that is the best part:  I'm known.  He knows me.  He knows me well.  He knows everything I've done or thought or not done.  He knows I have sinned terribly, yet he knows and forgives.  He knows I've loved as best I know how, but he knows I'm frail.  To him, I am an open book.  He knows me, and I am known.

This is no overnight miracle.  It is a slow miracle.  49 years in the making since birth, longer than that if we go upstream in the genealogy.

In early September 2012, I began praying for a miracle -- for relational healing.  For God to do something special in what's left of my marriage with Linda.  Our marriage.  For us, for our kids, for our extended families (both now and in the future).

In some sense, I have prayed for this miracle for a very, very long time.  But it is quite possible that I didn't call it a miracle.  In fact, it's quite possible that I haven't called any request a prayer for a miracle - ever.  (Honestly, it's hard to separate out when Christ was glad people asked for a miracle and when He was disappointed that they needed signs and wonders.  So I've erred before in praying on the side of not using the word "miracle.")

During this past month, the frequency of my prayers and the inclusion of my friends as partners in my prayers increased and intensified.  Yes, since early September, I have quite clearly asked God for a miracle -- and yes, I've named it just that.  A miracle -- in my marriage to Linda.  In our marriage.

As it turns out, one miracle that was needed was a miracle in me.  At this point, that is the miracle that I now see.  It is an important one, though unexpected in its revolutionary impact.

Over the past month, I have tried to listen, to wait.  To expect God to speak, act, and to change things (something, anything) for the better.  And, I say with certainty, He has done just that.

But what he's been changing -- at least what I can see right now -- is not what I expected for what he has changed is me.  And I'm writing it down now to remember it, to test it, to validate it, and to preserve it.  But since I know it to be true, I believe it is a moment in time that will have permanence.

Joan Chittister describes the slow miracle that I have experienced this way (and I read this only after I knew and begun recording the miracle itself, so her writing did not persuade me to think this):

Two qualities -- knowing that we have within us something that marks us in a special way and that this quality has been given to us for some reason greater than ourselves -- are the essence of coming to wholeness.  The task of determining what that quality is and what to do with it is the single great work of being alive.

No one I know thinks it all happens in a straight line.  No, life is more exciting than that.  It's learning to live it that matters.  Finding our own particular challenge may be difficult at first.  But we do.  Finally.  Eventually.  However difficult the way.

As the day that closed the month of prayer descended -- October 4, 2012 -- this is how I expressed the change in me out loud.  To two people at the same time -- to my wife and to our counselor.  I said:

I'm done with sadness.  I'm finished with protest.  For one last time, I ask your forgiveness.  And I forgive you.  For everything.  I'm a person of hope; and I will always carry hope with me.  And I'm optimistic about life.  For too long, I've carried around sadness about my failure at marriage; but that load has lifted.  I feel freedom; and I want you to experience that freedom, too.

This moment was a big moment (for me), but in some ways it was the tip of the iceberg.  Over the past few weeks, it's easy to see how light began to break through until it reached high noon.

When Carlos lays on hands (something that is quite foreign for me), healing pours out.  When he says, "you will be restored," he means it and I believed it.  When my friends permitted me to express my failure, release happened.

Yes, I have failed.  But I am loved.

Yes, I have fallen.  But I am being lifted up.

Yes, I am broken.  But I will be restored.

No, even better:  we are loved; we are being lifted up; and we will be restored.  Somehow, somewhere, sometime.  Now or later.  But certainly.

And as this seed grew in me, the lyrics to Rise (see earlier post) took me by surprise and took root.

And so I am now free.  Free to fail.  Free to fall.  Free to be broken.  Free to mourn.  Free to have joy in  the middle of all this, knowing that God is good and Christ will restore all things.

Barbara Brown Taylor wrote:

I am not in charge of this House, and I never will be.  I have no say about who is in and who is out.  I do not get to make the rules.  Like Job, I was nowhere when God laid the foundations of the earth.  I cannot bind the chains of Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion.  I do not even know when mountain goats give birth, much less the ordinances of the heavens.  I am a guest here, charged with serving other guests -- even those who present themselves as my enemies.  I am allowed to resist them, but as long as I trust in our God who made us all, I cannot act as if they are no kin to me.  There is only one House.  Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.  Jacob's "nowhere," about which he knew nothing, turned out to be Bethel, the house of God.  

Even though his family had imploded, even though he had made his brother angry enough to kill him, even though he was a scoundrel from the word go -- God decided to visit Jacob right where he was, though Jacob had not been right about anything so far and never would be.  God gave Jacob vision, so Jacob could see the angels going up and down from earth to heaven, going about their business in the one and only world there is.  The vision showed Jacob something he did not know.  None of this was his doing.

The only thing he did right was to see where he was and say so.  Then he turned his pillow into an altar before he set off, praising the God who had come to him where he was.  

Slowly the miracle happened in me.  My eyes opened to all this, and I have new sight.

And freedom.

• freedom to love unconditionally
• freedom to forgive everything without counting any more
• freedom to hope in the middle of storm
• freedom, though choking it out, to say "I love grace" in front of 17 colleagues in a somber, formal setting
• freedom to return insults, criticism, and ambivalence with compassion and blessing and interest
• freedom to fail because I'm loved . . . more than I ever knew . . . by the most amazing Maker
• freedom to experience joy and happiness in trial
• freedom to pray again -- with faith, believing -- after years of silence
• freedom to relax my introversion and enjoy the company of others more
• freedom to be compassionate -- to understand others more

No matter what happens, what twists the story takes, what blind turns run off temporary cliffs -- no matter what -- I do not want to return to Despair Dock.  If hell is defined as the place where joy is absent, then that place is hell.  I think Jesus taught us that heaven could be joined with earth -- that is the point I seek.

Someone referenced Mirza Ghalib, an Urdu poet from Persia and India, for the following quote:

For the raindrop, joy is entering the river.

Please, friends.  Please, God.  Push me in.  That is where I want to live.  Not in some dry dock.  Let the river take me where you will, Lord.

***       ***       ***

Somewhere and somehow along the way, the slow miracle really occurred.  And I believe that slow miracles will continue to happen because the same God who worked this miracle in me is working in the world around me every day, in every person I see and know.  In me.  In my wife.  In my kids.  In my colleagues.  In every person on the crowded subway.  In every person on this plane.  In every person on this planet.  On earth, as he is also doing in heaven.

Slow Miracles arrived today.

They do every day.