I had completely forgotten about this until a few days ago, but when I was a Christian I interpreted a minor event as a miracle. I used to deliver newspapers, the fastest way was to go on my roller blades, but rain was very bad for them, so on rainy days I had to use another means (a bike or having my mom drive me around). One day I was out on my route and right near the end it started to sprinkle, so I really pushed myself to finish and get home as fast as I could. As soon as I walked in the door it started pouring outside. (In reality, the timing probably wasn't quite this tight, but to me it felt like it went from nothing to torrential rain the moment I crossed the threshold.) I remember thinking that God must have held the rain back for me so I could get home relatively dry. This was my miracle.
Thinking about it later, I realized how self centered I was being. Rain is something that affects a large number of people at the same time. Making a change that would help one person out could have repercussions that would hurt another. If it starts later it would have to end later (or rain harder I guess). Or maybe it would have to rain in a slightly different place. On the other hand, God is pretty big, surely he can help me without hurting someone else. But why would God go to all that trouble just to help some kid not get his roller blades wet? I went back and forth like this for a while.
My other thought in regards to this event calls back to the fact that the rain affects a large number of people at the same time. Let's say for the sake of argument that 100,000 people got rained on that day, odds are that someone will narrowly miss the rain. If everyone had been thinking like me that day, someone would have thought they experienced a miracle, whether or not there is any kind of a deity.
So what really happened that day? Was I randomly just a lucky person who narrowly avoided some water, or did God help me out? The funny thing is, there is no way to know for sure, but that is part of the problem. I can never prove that God didn't help me out that day, but it seems more reasonable to me that I was just lucky.
Why is it that when something crazy happens to some people, they consider it a miracle from God if it's good, but often consider something odd that's bad as a "freak accident?" Unless of course it happens to someone else. I'm obviously generalizing here.
ReplyDeleteI like your points about odds. I think we forget about statistics a lot in our everyday lives. Everyday there's going to be some lucky bastards with close calls and others who will die or be disfigued because of something "unlucky."
The other thing that is nuts is when there is some tragedy that kills 200 people and someone lives, they will say it is a miracle and God saved them. How selfish do you have to be to look at it from that perspective? 200 people just died.
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