Peeking onto the dance floor in heaven

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/031218.cfm
Isaiah 65:17-21
John 4:43-54

How many signs by God are enough to convince us? For some folks the number is only one. For others, each miracle piles up until the accumulation is so overwhelming all doubts are erased. The first, singular miracle can happen at any age. The second, a steady escalation of divine wand-waving, can also be reached in youth, but is more likely to climb to an “aha” moment over decades. Some of us will hesitate until the final revelatory miracle at our deaths.

In any scenario of God’s hand touching — a purposed leading to our belief — I tend toward intervention as obligatory by God. Yes, I said it. Without miracles we wouldn’t know God, and therefore wouldn’t believe in him. Miracles, then, must be his messaging tool. Our lives require a necessary display of God doing all kinds of things to awaken us, assure us, form us, and eventually take us into his arms. We need confirmation and the physical certainty that God is real and loving, and God needs to do that.

A miraculous intervention of some sort by God, though, is not best categorized as a requirement for God. That’s kind of silly, even if true. It’s actually the outcome of necessary consequence. In other words, at any level of intimacy with God miracles will result. His intimacy with us is miraculous, in both the communication that takes place and the physical intervention he chooses.

I remember a period during my teens where the identification of miracles seemed to be manufactured. I kept a running catalog of them. Weird, yes ... I had my reasons.

My mother spoke about miracles happening on a regular basis. As I grew older I began to see more coincidence than miraculous intervention. I didn’t want to be a skeptic, but the assignment of miraculous intervention seemed to be more about rationalization. Why rationalize stuff? I guessed it was to calm us all down. 

On a number of occasions when the family was out for a drive, dad would narrowly avoid a car crash. “The man upstairs was looking out for us,” my dad would mutter. Mom would mention my dad’s driving as a requirement for such a divine intervention if we were all to survive. Dad always smiled at that. I often noticed, however, that drivers on the road had learned to watch out for drivers like my dad. God might be there, sure, but I realized that experiences add up. Careful balances out careless. I simply decided that watching out for other cars was more likely than God running around monitoring traffic.

Then one afternoon my estimation of miracles took another turn. Mom got into a car accident herself, driving into the back of a car with better brakes than hers.  She pointed out the miraculous hand of God keeping us from all getting killed. That became a new kind of miracle, and more suspect. 

I listed two kinds of miracles as a teenager. Those when divine intervention made sure nothing happened that probably should have, and those when something happened but nobody got hurt. I could understand the general idea of those two kinds of miracles. The two of them were interesting, yet still seemed more rationalized than realized. Then, a third category popped up that didn’t fully make sense to me. That’s when somebody got hurt after all, and my mom would say, “Thank God they only broke a leg.” 

“Okay,” I would say to myself. This miraculous category held all those things that were horrible, but something else was more horrible. As I got older the halfway horrible category happened more and more often. The number of broken leg incidents peppered the front page of the newspaper that I had begun to read. Every day somebody ended up in a hospital with their own version of a broken leg.

The inevitable finally took place. Somebody died. The father of a friend of mine dropped dead mowing the lawn. “God wanted him to come home. It was his time,” my dad said. Mom nodded. I was perplexed.

How had I missed that as a miraculous thing? I wasn’t paying attention, I guess. The reality of death’s tragedy sunk in. A friend, a neighbor, or somebody in the family would not receive a timely benefit of miraculous intervention because they needed to die. “Everyone dies, son.” None of us gets out alive.

Wow. What was this all about? I knew about death, but I had never really felt it. I also had not considered that this could point out a new category of miracles.

The complexity of God’s early and late involvement, and then apparent absence altogether in order for us to die some horrendous death added a calculus to miracles that went beyond my understanding. I had taken geometry and algebra. They were confusing, but seemed eventually to be based upon logic. Calculus, however, allowed the addition of stuff outside of alpha numeric reason. My folks operated in that mystical arena as far as I was concerned.

It’s at this point that most of us either lose all sense of the miraculous or we allow God to explain himself. We’re all different on the scale and weight of God’s intervention. In each of us, however, I believe God must intervene. Death often plays out our awakening. God gets our attention and then explains himself. 

I am certainly not saying that someone must die for us to be awakened to God’s miraculous intervention. That sounds as ridiculous as saying that God is forced to only use miracles to awaken us. Nonetheless, death and God’s miraculous intervention are the truth. The realization that God rescues us in death must come to us through God’s intervention in our thinking. Our calculations cannot deal with ours and other’s deaths with God present through those deaths. What kind of God is that? We need miraculous intervention to see why and how God can allow death. He has both reason and rescue in mind, regardless of our view of things.

All the divine intervention going on while we live must include God’s intervention at our deaths too. Where’s the miracle at that final point? Simply said, God takes us home. This life is temporary, and our home is eternal. My folks had it right. How did they know? My father said it, but admitted his doubts. At his death we knew he was going home. He hung onto our hope. My mother nodded at death’s miraculous transition into heaven, assured it was true. At her own death she even said it. “I am going home.” That enlightenment can only come from God’s assurance. We symbiotically all know it to be true. God assures us. We doubt. God reassures us. 

The recognition of God’s miraculous interventions plays out like a dance. He helps us pick out something to wear. He sits with us in the car as we consider not going in. God stands with us as we lean against the wall. At all moments, God courts us with both small and large miraculous interventions. Quite often we turn him down. He courts us again and again. Hopefully, we eventually allow him to take us onto the dance floor. 

I imagine some of us will flop like corpses eventually dragged onto the dance floor like the dead person we are after our actual death. The duds we wore at our funerals, hiked around our shoulders as God grabs us by our feet and slides us across heaven’s dance floor. Music playing. Our eyes squeezed shut. I think even there God still courts us. After a couple of rattles of our limp bodies we might hear the music and figure that something is happening there. We’ll have to open our eyes eventually. Not so sure about that, but God’s got to keep trying. It’s in the first paragraph. Intimacy with God is a steady string of miracles, which must be impossible to ignore. 

A real peek onto heaven’s dance floor seems like the ultimate miracle. A whole new category of miraculous intervention. I hope so.