Was it a miracle?

On Saturday morning, I got one of those phone calls, the kind with which you know, just by the fact of who is calling, that you're either in for a visit or for bad news. It was bad news: the brother of a friend was hospitalized with a serious illness.

The catch was, the friend still lives in Virginia, where we knew her before moving seven years ago. Meanwhile, her brothers lives and is hospitalized in Canton, Ga. Our friend was in Canton, and was looking for a church that could reach out to her brother.

Now, for the amazing part: After leaving Virginia, we lived five years in Florida till moving to the northern suburbs of Atlanta in 2003--not far from Canton. Then we joined Cherokee Presbyterian Church in Woodstock, which decided just this summer to relocate--to Canton. When we finally touched base with our friend later in the day, she was ecstatic that there was someone she knew in the Atlanta metro area and that those folks were part of a church in her brother's back yard. Her comment: "It's just a miracle!"

I understand her sentiment. Yet, I wouldn't classify this chain of events as miraculous, at least not in the sense of the biblical miracles. In those instances, God used His power in clearly supernatural ways. God's fingerprints are clearly all over these circumstances, but in them we see His providence, His wise ordering of all things for the good of His people and His glory.

And yet, living as we do in a culture that sees the world as operating on blind chance, any clear evidence of God's providential working is prone to receiving the label of "miracle."

The lesson in all of this, I think, is that we need to retrain our eyes to see that God's hand is at work in myriad ways every minute all around us. The Word of God indicates that all things are ordered by our sovereign God. As hard as it is to say it, that must include my friend's brother's illness. We would never call such a hard providence miraculous, because it troubles rather than comforts us, but the God of providence stands behind it just the same. And somewhere within it there must be something comforting and lovely, for it comes from the God who is both powerful and very, very good.