Contemplating Miracles

Dear Friends,

After chemo last Monday, I am just now feeling slightly human again. Which is a shame since we are back in chemo tomorrow and it will probably wreck me for another week. We may take some weeks off after this one. But I wanted to blog out a few things that have been on my mind since my last post.

The truth is that sadness has often overwhelmed me and I have often went back to God and asked him for all sorts of stuff. I have tried to pray first of all each time that firstly that His will be done, because that is how Yeshua taught us to pray both in the Lord's prayer and in his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. But Yeshua also taught us in the parable of the neighbor who needed some food for an unanticipated guest in the middle of the night that we should be persistent in asking for what we want, too. So I ask. I ask a lot. I ask him for immediate miraculous healing, help with finances, and a myriad of other challenges, mostly for my selfish self, but also for an ever growing prayer list of others. After thinking about the one time we are permitted to test God according to scripture, I have added another one: Abba Yahweh, please give me the big blessing, the one you said I would not be able to contain. Please soon Father. I am still testing Him you see, but I hope in a much more reverent manner.

And a funny thing happened. I looked around through my chemo misery and realized I was in my own house for the first time in over a year. I was with my family and not in a hospital. We were putting up our Christmas tree together for the first time in two years. A group of our neighbor's kids, all girls, helped put up the tree. It reminded me of the girl gang that we had on Davis Monthan AFB that would hang out at our house on base-kids of all the USAF members who lived on our street. The sound of little girls laughing-music to my ears.

I basically broke down and cried like a baby. (I sequestered myself in another room for a while so as not to freak anybody out.) I asked God for the big blessing that I could not contain and He sure gave it to me. A blessing so big that my heart could not contain it and it burst forth with tears mixed of pain, joy, and thankfulness.

So, of course, I went ahead and asked Him for the next big blessing that I cannot contain.

It was time for Christmas Journey at our church. They put on a full live outdoor drive thru drama in the church parking lot depicting the life of Jesus. Deanna and Elizabeth acted in it, in a scene called the Teaching And Healing scene. My father in law attempted to drive me there, but the line was literally miles long. We aborted and they dropped me back off at home. I texted Deanna to let her know I would miss it, except for viewing it via web cam on the church web site, which only showed one scene. It happened to be hers.

And then He did it again, the big blessing that I could not contain. The church volunteers couldn't see the line so Deanna showed them my text where I stated that the line went around the church in central McKinney to well into the south side of town around the perimeter road of a town park of many acres. She did this just so they would know how many customers they had coming. But the volunteers did something amazing to reflect the love of Christ. They first offered for me to ride in the hay ride wagon, but she told them about how the air would bother my breathing (we are in a cold snap right now). Then they offered me to ride in the pick ups pulling the hay ride trailers, but that would leave my mother-in-law out, who is also a cancer fighter. So then they just let my father-in-law drive us both in through the hay ride route which by-passed the car line, eliminated the hours long wait that would have drained me and messed up my med/feeding schedule, and also kept us in a nice warm vehicle to protect both of our sensitive lungs from the frigid air. Those people bent over backwards so a couple of cancer fighters could get in to see the drama. And what a drama it was. 800 volunteers set up multiple scenes for three frigid nights because of their great love for Jesus. How much He was honored here. When I got home, the blessing was so big that I could not contain it. I thought about all those volunteers and how hard they were working for Jesus, to spread his gospel, under such austere conditions. I though about how harder it was for the volunteers playing Christ in several scenes, and how much harder still it was for the christian brothers and sisters playing roles against Christ, like the Sanhedrin, the Pilate and the other Romans, and even a someone whose role it fell to play Satan. Yet they all performed admirably, for the love of Jesus. And the volunteers who jumped hoops to make special arrangements for two cancer fighters who could have easily been written off and forgotten.. The thought of all the love was too much for my heart to contain, and the tears came again.

So I asked him again. God please send me the next big blessing that I cannot contain soon.

Well, we shall get blood tests at the clinic tomorrow and then, if everything looks okay, will proceed to the hospital to get chemo'd due to this latest insurance Tri-Care flap. We also just learned of a fascinating technology going to clinical trial soon where they may be able to trick my body into growing its own new esophagus. Just starting to research that one. Maybe it's the next big one?

I wonder what it will be?

Our pastor did a session where he told us about a scientist who had calculated the odds of Yeshua fulfilling just eight of the prophecies that He fulfilled. The odds were astronomical, a gazillion to one, so to speak.

In college I had a physics professor who was teaching Quantum Physics to a combined class of undergrad and grad students. He had a fabulous math background that made him good for this class, much more than your average physics academic. One day he showed how to use calculus to determine the probability of an electron penetrating an electromagnetic field which classical methods said the electron could not breach. It was about a gazillion to one. After that, in an off-the-cuff sort of way, he mentioned that this calculus could also be adapted to see the odds of a man being able to walk through a wall. I suppose it was a deliberate indirect reference to Christ. At the time, I was fully steeped in secular science and didn't believe in Jesus. I wasn't even sure I believed in God, though I suspect I did deep down. So I inferred the comment to mean something along the lines of "There is no supernatural, miraculous God. These things are just naturally explainable, albeit highly unlikely, results of scientific laws that we can discover, codify, and manipulate."

(If you really must know, quantum physics is able to describe physical particles that make up everything around us as having a dual nature, both as traditional particles where classical rules apply, and as waves where all sorts of magic can happen. Each particle, using a special part of math called Fourier Transforms, can be described as a sum of an infinite number of wave patterns. When you combine all the waves, you can make them cancel each other out everywhere except where the particle exists, giving you your particle. But because the waves get to play by different rules, you can also modulate them in time to cancel each other out and disappear the particle on the encounter side of a barrier, only to recombine and reappear the next instant in time on the other side of the barrier. Now, doesn't that sound just like Jesus to turn all the old rules upside down to do something completely new? The math is exquisitely beautiful and exquisitely difficult at once-at least for me it was. I barely passed the class even though I loved it dearly.)

We have to be careful when we use these numbers to talk about faith. Believers say "The odds are a gazillion to one, so this must be an authentic miracle and support for Christ." But the secular scientists say "It may be a gazillion to one, but it's not zero. Jesus was just like the millionth guy to pull the handle at Vegas and get lucky. He was in the right time and place. There is no real miracle here."

At the end of the day, I believe that Yeshua deliberately made these probabilities very small but non-zero. He wants your heart, not your calculator. So in the end, everyone considering the question of Yeshua must make their personal decision based on faith, not on numbers. There are all sorts of things in science that point the way to Jesus, and they can be great tools to strengthen our faith and even to evangelize. But we will never "scientifically prove Christ". I don't think He wants a bunch of converts who are there because human science was able to support him. He wants our hearts, so He has deliberately gamed the probabilities so that yes, there is still a very very small scientific probability that He is not God. We must search deep in our hearts to hear and follow his voice based, in the end, on faith. Those tiny scientific probabilities support His truth far more than the horrible alternative, but they don't provide the final answer, which must come, by design, from a far deeper place.

I'd like to throw out a special prayer request for Deanna who is working way too hard right now. That she would learn to not try and fix up the whole house right now along with everything else she has to do and burn herself out in the process-the house needs to be done in small steps over a long time in between higher priorities. It's not really something at this point that anyone can help with--helpers would just put things in wrong places. She should get to decide where everything goes and must know exactly where they went. Thus it falls totally on her. Pray that she would take this on slowly, a bit at a time, and find rest and peace and joy.

Yours in Christ,
-Mike