Prayer Answered!

Scott Mayhew of Saratoga Springs Utah was in a real pickle. He was home alone, out in his garage working on his SUV when suddenly the vehicle became unstable and fell on him.

Crushed beneath the weight, with broken ribs and other internal injuries, Mayhew somehow managed to call out for help - for over an hour, but to no avail.

Then he tried prayer: "I just knew if I hung on long enough, my prayers would be answered and she would know to come home."

Miles away, Nicole, Scott's wife, was at work. She says had a gut feeling, experienced a spirit warning her to go home and check on her husband. She knew she must go check on her husband. By heeding her instinct she was able to save her husband's life.

Prayer answered! I do believe such things are possible. I have a real problem with the idea of prayer as imploring an old man in the sky to grant our wishes. Yet I can't help feeling that prayer somehow serves as a method of tapping into the Divine Source.

I can't explain such things. Nevertheless, theory will never trump the experience of these things - and I have experienced them in my own life. 

A Word About Crude Representations

My maternal grandmother had been a nurse when she was a younger woman. She gave birth to my mother when she was thirty-three years old and quit nursing in order to raise her new daughter and her second husband's three boys.

A story I always got a kick out of hearing Mom relate was when, as a child, she heard her mother talk about the male and female hormones which everyone have in their bodies, which give us our distinguishing features. Being a child, my mom came up with a rather novel if crude way of picturing hormones.

That is, she pictured miniature penises and testicles as male hormones and the female genitalia, of course, were the female hormones and these both coursed through the bloodstream and human system.

Now it never occurred to my mom to doubt all these little genitalia all humans have. After all, her mom was a nurse and knew about such things and certainly wouldn't deceive her.

I'm sure some of her little friends might have doubted such a picture. Others, no doubt, might have accepted it as perhaps not that far-fetched. (Remember, I'm talking about kids back in the old pre-internet, pre-information glut days.)

So what I see there is a crude depiction of reality. My mother hadn't nailed the exact truth, but she did have a vivid way of picturing it. I'm not sure how a preteen in that day might have grasped it better in a simple manner.

Sometimes those of us who are interested in the deeper reality we call God fall into the habit of picturing or talking about God in simplistic, even crude ways. Those who oppose the God concept do so also, I'm sure not in part because it makes the subject easier to dismiss out of hand.

So the old white haired and bearded guy in the sky is a crude representation. It is easy for God-believers to anthropomorphize God. We sometimes use metaphors like God as mother, father or friend which can be stretched to the point of absurdity.

Now in truth my mom at 8 or 10 didn't realize she was making a crude representation. It was the best her child's mind could conjure. Some God believers are also unwittingly crude in their representations of the divine. Right idea, wrong details.

At best I think the finite mind cannot begin to grasp the infinite.

Modern Miracles

I am reading the article Miracles That Stunned Doctors in the April Reader's Digest. Interesting stuff there.

These aren't miracles in the Humean sense but rather the types of things that while obviously not contrary to the laws of nature, are still so strikingly unlikely it causes those of us who hold a spiritual worldview to pause and see the divine.

Personally, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of God working against the system. For the same reason I find evolutionary theory more credible than direct creation.

As for the types of miracles recorded in the above articles, many doctors will say "meh."

Others, such as Matt Linam, MD at Arkansas Children's Hospital, who oversaw the "miraculous" recovery from a brain-eating amoebae of 12 year-old Kali Hardig, might say "Number one, it was God's grace." As he did.

The Humean miracles I was brought up to believe in led me directly to the idea of a very capricious God. It leads directly to the "why do bad things happen to good people" conundrum.

But now I think of life as a spiritual experience. As such, if one looks for them, if one is open to them, there are lots of examples of divine activity to be found. At least that's the way I think about the matter now.

I'm increasingly becoming convinced there is a divine element in life. I believe that divine element can be connected to, and life much enriched when it is connected to. I seek to develop my intuitive sense and I search for synchronicities (and I find them).

It seems to me that life itself is a miracle, or if not then an inexplicable cosmic accident. Therefore I believe in the Logos. And I believe in miracles.

Back...At Last! (Hopefully)

Sometimes life's ills seemingly come out of nowhere. Other times you realize you are courting a fall. For example, here I sit typing away on an old computer and - get this - as one of the dwindling number of folks who still use dial-up internet. Should I have been surprised when one day without any warning my computer crashed? Probably not, but was anyhow.

At about the same time that foul episode occurred I began to get extremely busy on my job. My time for coaxing my computer back to life was limited. Slowly I managed to get back online. But there was so much I wasn't able to do, including reading some of my email.

Before the crash I used Google Chrome as my web browser, but now with my computer barely limping along, I wasn't unable with my outdated Internet Explorer to reinstall it. That meant that my blog was off limits, as with a great many other web sites.

I continued using what little spare time I could find to work on this thing. I'm not very talented with computing. I thought it was probably time to get a new computer, but guess what? It is getting increasingly difficult to find new computers with old-fashioned dial-up modems, and in fact, I wasn't able to locate one around town (but again I haven't had much time to look).

Okay, I thought, maybe it is time to go modern with my internet service. But the problem remained that I haven't been able to schedule a non-holiday day off in order to have someone come out and hook me up.

So I continued to limp along and work on things here and there. Then suddenly today I started to get someplace. And now look: here I am ... back from blogging death. (Of course if I suddenly turn up missing again you should suspect my computer problems have returned.) But for now, and until I get off 11 hour days, six days a week, I'm going to try to make do with what I've got. My blogging time is still limited.

It's great to be back. I've missed everyone. Thanks to my cyber friend Zoe for checking on me and reporting back here what had happened. All my contact info was lost in the crash, so my cyber friends were out of reach for me.

For a while there I had a backlog of sorts of themes I wanted to blog about. But the frustration eventually settled in and I just concentrated on work and life, my sick computer getting a little attention here and there. I'm off blogging stride now but eager to get back to business. I'm hoping there are still folks here interested in reading me again.