Miracles: A Conversation

Poem transcribed as performed.

She says, “Maybe God isn’t for everyone.” And I say, “Funny, he died for everyone. He died so that our faults were not a one-way ticket to damnation. He died to give us a chance, a mercy people have turned their noses up to for generations. She says she, “doesn’t understand why her friends get miracles but she doesn’t; wonders why she doesn’t meet the ‘standards’ for blessings,” and I say “Baby, your miracles are in waiting. You can not fill God’s plan with doubt. We cannot pray without faith and expect better outcomes. “I think I lost God a long time ago she says, maybe I have filled myself up with all of the bad things that He can no longer see me. Maybe, just maybe, that is why I don’t see miracles anymore, I don’t deserve blessings in a life full of filth.”

I can almost laugh at the way she thinks, the same way I find myself thinking on my bad days, the way we all find ourselves on the days the devil tries to pull all his tricks. Trying to make us think that there isn’t an army behind us. Twisting our belief in an effort to make my Father seem smaller, to make us think there isn’t someone out there that has our back. That we are all alone. The devil tried to make my God lose His capitalization. But little does he know, he is in my Father’s battlefield and we have the upper-hand. And I can’t wait to watch my Father chain him up.

I tell her, “A million mistakes have happened in your lifetime but you are not one of them. This life is not some accident or a big bang, we did not come into existence just to live and die. We are meant to know him, as well as he knows every single one of us. The way he knew you even before you knew him.” Silence takes over the phone call and I wonder if this is what it sounded like before the creation of us, if God dwelled with renewed purpose, if he dreamed of what we could be.

“How can I be worth so much?” She asks, hesitant but wanting to know. Wanting to get back what was stolen from her, what she tried to run from. What happened to her when her life became more about surviving than living, much of what happens to us when it eats us up and spits us out after.

“We are fatherless children,” I tell her, “We know what abandon feels like, what this pit feels like, we were never told we were miracles, we did not believe in fairytales like that. But we have to remember that we are not just the flock that has been left behind we are the one out of the 99, God did not forget about us, God did not seek others because it was too hard to reach us.”

“You are worth so much more than you think. God has chased after you on all the days of your life where you were set on running. God sacrificed his beloved Son because he loved you. Loved you so much he gave up His life scared and beaten, close to death he gave his final breath for you. Terrified but on the brink of changing everything he thought about the lives here and to come and sacrificed himself so we could live. Jesus was the greatest miracle to happen to us. Despite his circumstance and upbringing, he was King to a world that did not deserve him.

“What good can come out of Nazareth they said.” But to him, we were the miracle he set his life on to save; and doesn’t that make you worth it? That your God died and was raised to save you. On the third day, the son of man rose again. So that he could defeat the devil and remove his claim on us. He told the devil that he could not have us, could not take his children and declared victory for all of us. Jesus made a promise to us on that day, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Promising that we would never truly be alone.

Sometimes we expect bigger miracles and do not see the smaller ones happening in our lives already. The fact that we woke up today is one of them, that you have your family and friends beside you, that we are all here because of him. My God’s curriculum leaves no one behind and no one is too good or too bad for him. No matter what you have done or what may have been done to you, it does not lessen your value. It does not make his sacrifice any less than.

Just before I hung up, disconnecting from the thing that allowed us to speak; despite the miles between us I told her, “And isn’t it a miracle in its own right? That he was sent down with one purpose…To save you.