I am nearing the end of editing my essays for the book, hopefully to come out in about 6 months, and I have learned one frustrating thing: that with all the good advice, with all the examples of the sacred touching my life in so many ways, with all the insights, I am still me. Oh, maybe there have been some slight changes; maybe a little more patience, a little more acceptance of things as they are, but ME still rages on, knocking from one side of life to another like a – I was going to say “idiot” but I will say “fool.” I can only say in retrospect that life is like a tobacco habit – even if the habit doesn’t get you high, even if it’s bad and then worse and worse for you, on you go, knowing full well what an idiot – er, fool – you are. There is always room for improvement, but how often does that come tomorrow and not today? One more butt; or, for our case, one more day scowling at life’s fortune, wishing for something more.
It’s like miracles: we can have a whole bunch of them, attested to by hundreds or even thousands, such as the life of Jesus, or the miracles at Fatima or Lourdes, and yet, still we scoff like Doubting Thomas, who had seen it all, yet could still not believe, even as he and so many other scoffers had lived before the age of science, which has taken “doubt” to a new level. This gravity, this blindness, is so strong, and potentially so bad for us - like cigarettes - but still we continue.
In the latest book just finished – Miracles from Heaven, by Christy Wilson Beam, we have another well-written example of a clear miracle that has changed the life of this family, but will probably change few others. The true life story goes like this: the Beams had three little girls in their Texas dream house, living the life they had longed for – but sometimes regretted (the woman had had a long bout of depression) - when the middle daughter, at age 4, came down with a rare and incurable disease. It had to do with intestinal blockage, and was both extremely painful and extremely dangerous. They lived day to day with her condition, their lives spun around the expense of trips to Boston specialists and constant worry, until one day…that one remarkable day when their daughter fell down into a tree.
She had been feeling better and had been climbing the big cottonwood on the property with her other sisters when the branch they were on began to creek. The elder told her to step off into a large hole left by a fallen branch so that she could pass and lessen the weight on the limb. The sick sister finally complied, but found to everyone’s amazement that the hole went down to the bottom of the tree, thirty feet below. She fell head first, and when Dad climbed up to call down, she would not answer. They called 911, and in came the fire trucks and helicopter (to whisk her away to the hospital when rescued, for everyone thought she must have severe head and neck trauma, if still alive). They got her out and flew her away; it was all captured on local TV. And then they found that, besides some bruises and scrapes, that she was OK. Luck, perhaps, but in the weeks that followed, they also found that her disease was not bothering her. Months passed to years, four at the time of writing, and she is off her meds, off of everything, and maturing like any other adolescent girl. Miracle; incurable disease cured.
Moreover, when she was down in the tree, she went to heaven and spoke to Jesus. The author is no dummy – she knows that the images the girl saw were in part from childhood programming in religion – but the knowledge she was given was true. She saw her unknown sister lost to miscarriage; she saw a great grandparent. And an “angel” stayed with her to keep her calm and give her the light needed to see the harness let down to her by the fire department. As with so many others in near-death experiences, she did not want to come back, but “Jesus” had told her that her time was not up, that she had things to do.
As with the last book reviewed about the psychologist dad and his dead son, we learn that indeed we have a mission here on earth. Unlike the last book, we have verifiable proof – from TV coverage to doctors’ charts – of the miracle. We can believe that it has changed the life of the family, strengthening their faith, but who knows? I have read other books of similar miracles where the husband and wife later get a divorce. But for the rest of us, those of us who have read the book, and those who are now reading this – will it change our lives? Will we stop our foolishness and have us live as if life were a gift, a miracle, surrounded by meaning and, yes, actual, Biblical-style miracles?
Probably not, or not much. And yet, as I have re-learned reading my essays for my own book, we, all of us, are touched by miracles of “chance” that seem too impossible to be near chance; all of us are given opportunities that perhaps we didn’t deserve; and all of us are given trials, from our own faults or simply from out of the blue, to learn, to grow – or to be ground under if we lose faith. All just like the book by Beam says; all just like so many people have said.
I step from this blog now with a promise to myself to give a prayer of thanks to the Great Blue, that Unknown which guides us, and to keep the spirit of miracle in my heart. I do it because I think it will help, and I am almost certain it will. But the gravity of the grind will get me again, no doubt about it. I, most of us, still have many lessons, seemingly endless lessons, to study and learn. I only hope they will not be big enough to call for a real- life miracle. And I pray that I will learn, at least little by little, what it is that pulls this world together and can make us whole. FK
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