I Believe In Miracles

I believe in miracles. Now, to be fair, I also believe in wood fairies and elves. I plan my attack for surviving the zombie apocalypse and can convince myself quite readily that toys come to life at night. Those things aren’t the same as miracles, though. I believe in those things because I want to. I think it’s fun to think I’m not alone in the woods when I’m hiking, that one day I might experience an “other world” out there. I think it’s neat to figure out whether I should go by boat or land, or stay put, when the zombies come. My imagination is my playground and I create a world there that I want to believe in.

Miracles are different, though. I believe in miracles the way I believe in science. I don’t understand them, but I’ve seen them in action. I believe in miracles because I have seen the evidence of their reality in my very own life. I do not doubt that I need oxygen to live and breathe. I do not doubt that miracles happen everyday.

Many people would consider my recovery from addiction and alcoholism to be a medical sort of recovery. Science says that if you go to rehab and follow steps x, y, and z then you are no longer an addict. Well, actually, science says that you’re an addict for the rest of your life but if you do what you’re told to then you can live without acting out on your addictive behaviors.

I, on the other hand, know my recovery to be miraculous. First of all, I haven’t followed any of the steps. Even the rehab I went to was anti-program. I’ve never sat in a circle and said “Hi, I’m an addict.” I actually got kicked out of rehab for being rebellious and overly anti-establishment. I hang out in bars and around people who do drugs. Science says I should be a big old relapsed mess of drug bags and hangovers.

Even that might not be the miracle. I know me. I know me better than I know anything else. I know that I’m not the kind of girl that gets and stays clean because of willpower or desire for a better life or any other such romantic idea. I’m the kind of girl that finds dark alleys romantic and thinks cocaine in bathrooms is sexy. I’m not the girl that gets and stays sober.

Except that I am. I am sober and I am, apparently, that kind of girl. Because I am the kind of girl that believes in healing, in miracles. I believe I am one.

Not convinced?

When I was in my very late teens I was told that I had a disease called poly cystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), characterized by dozens of little cysts on my ovaries that were continuously growing and bursting. I was told that, because of this disease, I would never be able to naturally conceive a child. I spent the first 10 years or so of that diagnosis mourning the idea that I would never be able to have a natural child without a lot of difficult and expensive medical intervention. Slowly I grew accustomed to the idea (or hardened to the mourning) and declared I didn’t want to have children, conceding that maybe someday I would adopt. I relish the role of Community Aunt and, over the last couple of years especially, have come to peace with what I believed to be my reality.

There was one moment, perhaps a year ago, at a nighttime church service, in which I swore I had been healed. There were visiting ministers, prayers for healing, shouting prophesies… all the things that get a good Evangelical worked up and feverish. I swore I had felt my insides being healed, I gave thanks for this healing. Months later, I had an ultrasound for an unrelated condition. The doctor mentioned the cysts on my ovaries in passing, pointing them out casually on his way by. My heart sank. I hadn’t been healed after all. I had fallen prey to the emotionalism of an Evangelical service and been a fool to believe otherwise. My heart hardened further.

Not a very convincing story of the miraculous, it it? I suppose not. Unless, that is, you fast forward another year or so to present day and find out that, to my complete astonishment, I am pregnant. Seven weeks pregnant with the naturally conceived child that was supposed to be impossible. That sounds much more on par with the miraculous.

The thing is, a few cysts doesn’t matter to God, or whether or not they are visible on an ultrasound. If He wants a baby to be conceived, He’s just going to go ahead and make that happen. Why? Well, because He believes in healing, in miracles.

You might say, “Well, there’s a chance the doctors were wrong or that you got pregnant by a fluke. Perhaps the cysts weren’t erupting that day or the egg sneaked by them all Mission Impossible like.” And there’s a chance you could be right. There’s the possibility science can explain exactly what happened. It’s nice when God let’s science find the reason behind miracles, but it doesn’t make things any less miraculous. Of course, I choose to believe in wood fairies. And oxygen. You choose what you like.

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