It Takes a Miracle

It Takes a Miracle
1 Samuel 1:19b-24

In Joshua, Judges, and Ruth for Everyone I referred to one of my students who spent last year preparing to get married but also developed increasingly intense headaches. A month or so before her wedding date she had an MRI that suggested a brain tumor. The doctors wanted to operate on it as soon as possible, though it was not clear what the result would be; she might still end up disabled in some way. Her family and friends urged the couple to bring the wedding forward, prayed for her incessantly, and helped them make the wedding happen over just one week. As she went for the surgery, her mother commented, “There is so much prayer going on, this tumor hasn’t a chance.” It was a fine comment, but of course life doesn’t work like that. Yet when the surgeons opened up her daughter’s head, they could find no tumor, only a messy blob. So they removed that, and sewed her up, and started scratching their own heads (meanwhile, she stopped having headaches). Was it a miracle? Was it a weird infection? Was it a virus she caught when scuba diving in Africa? The next theory was that it was the result of a slight hole in her heart that she has had since she was a baby, but then they couldn’t find much wrong with her heart. How does one think about the relationship between the way we understand things medically and the way we understand God’s involvement when something extraordinary happens?...