Near miss

Yes, there is hype and over-reporting. But as I've asked ordinary people whether they have ever seen a miracle, I've heard many credible stories. None of them has been widely reported. In fact, sometimes the persons's own family has never heard the story. 

Dale Flowers, my pastor, told me of a mission trip he took to China with a group of pastors in 1993. They were being chauffeured in a minibus down a remote, narrow road clogged with trucks. Vehicles, including their own, were passing each other at every opportunity. It was dusk, raining, and tense driving conditions, when an oncoming truck loaded with logs attempted pass. As the truck swerved into their lane, the load of logs shifted and lifted the truck off two of its wheels. To Dale and his fellow passengers, it appeared that only one of two things could happen: either the truck would tip over in their lane and they would crash into it, or the truck with its load of logs would fall on their minibus. They had nowhere to escape and no time to slow down. In an instant it became clear that they would all die. Dale didn't even have time to pray.

Then, defying the laws of gravity, the leaning truck was righted back on all four wheels and completed its pass without crashing into their vehicle. It was as if God had caught the falling truck, lifted it, and moved it out of the way of their minibus. Absolutely stunned by their escape, the pastors–ordinarily a talkative bunch–didn't say a word. Afterward, no one mentioned what had happened. And certainly, though I have heard Dale talk about the incident privately, I have never heard him preach of it in all his years of preaching.

You can understand why. The miracle made a difference to those pastors, but what difference would it make for others? If they weren't there to see it for themselves, they would probably be skeptical. Why press it? 

My friend Tim Hostetler became a Christian in the California Jesus movement:

At the age of twenty-one, I was a new Christian and I badly needed $20 to pay a bill. I remember getting down on my knees and asking God to somehow provide me with that money. I went to my mailbox, and there was a letter from someone I didn't know, with a check off $20.

I later found out that two weeks earlier, my sister had been talking to a lady who said she liked to send out checks to people in need. My sister told her that I probably needed some money, and she wrote me a check. When I learned about it I was amazed that God was not constrained by time. He put the answer to my prayer in motion two weeks before I prayed. There was no limit to what he could do in answering our prayers.

Lots of people have miraculous experiences like that when they are new Christians. Like little children when they pray, they see God's answers in direct and beautiful ways. 

Forty years later, Tim still knows that God has no limits, but he also knows that God does not always answer our prayers as we want. Tim has prayed for many people who were healed, yet he himself has suffered from chronic illness–disabling back pain, terrible digestive pain, regular migraine headaches. He's been on disability for decades. He's visited every doctor possible, and Christians all over the state have prayed for him. He's still very sick. 

"I've had thousands of migraine headaches, and I've had people pray for me hundreds of times. Only once have I been healed, when a man put his hand on my head and the pain went away immediately. I started praying for the research people in the labs. Since God wasn't healing my migraines through prayer, I thought medicine might be the way. And I thank God for Imitrex, because it really helps". Tim Stafford, Miracles (Bethany 2012), 120-21; 193-94.