The Personal and The Political

The Personal and the Political
1 Kings 17:1-24

I have just deleted an e-mail from a student in whose life I saw something of a miracle a few months ago. She had been diagnosed as having a brain tumor and was hastily scheduled for an emergency operation to try to remove it. The surgeons were not sure this would work, though her mother said on the eve of the operation, “There are so many people praying about this tumor, it doesn’t have a chance.” This was of course whistling in the wind. Prayer doesn’t work like that. But when the surgeons opened up the woman’s head, they couldn’t find a tumor, and they are still scratching their own heads about it. That doesn’t prove that a miracle happened; they are still assuming that there is some “natural” explanation. But it’s hard for those of us who were involved to believe that what happened was pure chance..