On Miracles & Thorns...

            Several weeks ago, I was getting into Sunday morning Praise & Worship at church, when the band started playing a song I hadn’t heard before - Too Good to Not Believe by Bethel. Yeah, some of you probably have heard this song, but I’ll be honest with you - I don’t make a personal habit of listening to 10-minute-long, “let’s-repeat-the-bridge-1700-times” Praise and Worship music if given the choice. Not to completely besmirch that type of music, because I do actually enjoy playing/singing it myself; I just shorten my versions of it significantly. Anyways, it was the lyrics “I’ve seen cancer disappear, I’ve seen metal plates dissolve… ...I’ve seen real life resurrection, I’ve seen mental health restored, Don’t you tell me He can’t do it, don’t you tell me He can’t do it…” that popped out at me.

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Now, I’ll also interject here with another observation from the past week that got me thinking even more. A few days ago, a social media post was passed around that, while not exactly outright condemning the whole “faith in miracles rather than in Christ” ideology, strongly combatted that belief system. All well and good, especially in an age where popular theology seems to focus heavily on the “nice, warm, feel-good” parts of Faith, be it God’s grace and forgiveness or the miraculous healing power He can and will bestow upon us, if He so wills. We’ll revisit how this factors into my recent processing later on in the post.

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Yet another factor that plays into the culmination of my processing further on in this article - I finished The Insanity of God last week. In his book, Nik Ripken talks about the impact that persecution or perceived “darkness” has on a church. He relays story after story of God’s breathtaking and miraculous power from believers in China, the Middle East, Northern Africa, etc. But in one of the final chapters, he tells a story that literally brought me to tears (These moments are rare for me - physically crying is something that is sorta “broken” in me due to past trauma that I’m thoroughly unwilling to dump upon you all, as honest as I am about some of what I would qualify as the harder experiences in my life. That to say, when I actually tear up about something, I take note of it, because, as mentioned before, these are rare occasions for me. This is a weird tangent; let’s get back to it.) 

He (Nik) relays an account where he was sitting in an American church service with a believer who had recently come to the US from a country where being a professing Christian was quite literally a death sentence, witnessing a baptism. He recounts how she suddenly begins to cry with joy at the miracle that was taking place in front of them - there were people able to boldly and proudly proclaim their faith in Jesus through baptism for all to see with absolutely no danger of being imprisoned or killed for doing so. Something deep within me awakened as he continued to point out during the remaining paragraphs of the chapter that it seems we as nice, comfortable American Christians have for a very, very long time now, taken for granted the absolute miracle it is that we can gather together freely on Sunday mornings (or any time throughout the week, for that matter) and shout at the top of our lungs the praise that we wish to express to our God. I could rant and rave for hours about the contents of The Insanity of God and the way God used them to continue the work in my heart and point me down the path He seems to have me on at the moment, but my reason for writing this is not to be a book report, so we’ll try to move on here.

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Yet another point of context for my headspace - I remember a specific day of class on Spiritual Gifts at Bible School many years ago. The text for that day had been taken from 1 Corinthians 12 and some of the class discussion revolved around if miracles still happen today or not. What I remember it being wrapped up with was the teacher mentioning something along the lines of “I still believe miracles happen today, but they tend to happen in unreached areas where God wants to display his power” and for some reason, I interpreted that as “there’s a huge chance I’ll never experience a miracle”. In retrospect, that was a fairly dumb conclusion for me to draw, as I literally have stories of experiencing real-life miracles while living in Africa, but again, not the point right now. Let me stress strongly here that I missed a boatload of context in drawing that conclusion in my mind at that time and I am not blaming the teachers of the Bible School for what ultimately became a chink in my faith. I jumped to that conclusion in my rush to “download the Mennonite way of life and thinking” during my time at Bible School. I was young and had yet to fully realize what having a full, personally realized and actualized faith really was. Sadly, the “there’s a big chance I’ll never personally experience a miracle” conclusion I came to years ago, not to mention my pretty warped interpretation of what a miracle actually was at the time followed me for quite a while.

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There’s yet another layer to this whole somewhat confusing string of thought that contributes to all of this (those of you who’ve spent any meaningful amount of time around me are extremely aware of this already, but I am not one for leaving out details or an angle of perspective when processing through something or telling a story). The past 3 or so years have involved me beginning to not only embrace but also embark down the journey of publicly disclosing my personal struggle with mental health. It started low and slow, with sharing a bit vaguely some of the things I was battling. Then a few friends of mine, some of whom I had considered for years as very normal, not at all bothered, people reached out and let me know that we had this beautiful mess in common. There was a strange hope that arose from that, as I began to learn that more and more people who I was acquainted with could actually understand and relate to this battle I’d been facing for years. Along with that came the realization, of course, that not everyone would be able to understand - some people would look blankly at me when I mentioned it; some were curious, but not in a “knowing” sort of way; some would joke about it, not knowing those jokes actually hurt a lot more than they could probably ever imagine; and some, although completely unable to fully realize the battle, were still willing to sit down and hear me try to explain it.

But I’m not here to point fingers at some people and give others shout-outs, though if you happen to be one of the folks who reached out way back when I started this whole journey, know that I appreciate you sooooo much!!! It was so, so, so refreshing to know that not only was I not alone in all of this, but that there were people directly in my peer group that could relate - it wasn’t one of those things that “only the godless people of Hollywood” talked about and dealt with and I wasn’t “just not praying enough and giving it all to God instead of worrying”. There was a period where I felt intense guilt because I felt that somehow I wasn’t fully obedient to 1 Peter 5:7 because no matter how much I would pray, there would still be overthinking and anxiety waiting to greet me when I woke up the next morning. So again, thanks to all you all who were willing to divulge that vulnerable part of your life to me in my time of darkness. I know it isn’t easy, but God really did use it for good!

So anyway, now that the whole “Michael gets distracted with doling out words of affirmation tangent” is over, let's get back to it. My journey of slowly publicly disclosing more and more of my story with anxiety, and to that end, more or less my life’s testimony as a result, has been an amazing one. Something about my personality has developed into a weird propensity to wax quite candid about personal experiences that some folks find difficult to even speak about vaguely in public. At first, it was just a way for me to “stop living the lie of a perfect social media life” but very quickly, God revealed to me that other people oddly enough find some sort of solace in reading my brain dumps on occasion - which is just strange, because it’s not usually all that polished, refined, or even fully processed. But somehow I guess it’s blessing people, and that’s not any of my doing. So that kinda segues into my main reason for bringing my mental health stuff up YET AGAIN.

I talk about it frequently, and have alluded to the work that God has done in my life as a result of it, but Instagram captions never allow for enough characters to even remotely scratch the surface of what God has wrought through it all. There was a period, early into fully realizing that I was, in fact, a “broken and flawed” human through the discovery that my condition was one of anxiety. You see, for some time, years ago, I had shrugged off my parents’ and other well-meaning people’s suggestions of perhaps seeking out counseling for the things I was facing because deep down, I was worried that the counselor would reveal the truth of what I feared most - that I was in fact broken, weird, and would never really fit in. But I did, and while my counselor never really spelled it out like that, he allowed me the intentional space and helped to develop the framework by which I learned to start processing through what I was feeling and to be honest with myself about the fact that I was, in fact, broken, weird, and different, but that that could ultimately be a good thing and did not equate to ostracization. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re all human, so in our own unique ways, we’re all broken and flawed by design. I find great comfort in knowing that you, yes you, the one reading this right now, are flawed as well. I sometimes have a hard time believing that some of you all are quite as bent out of shape as I am, not to mention those friends of mine whose stories make me wonder why I talk about my “little problems” so much compared to what they have and continue to deal with.

But again, I’m leaning off track here, so let’s pull back into the main point. Somewhere in the months following my first real struggle with thoughts of suicide years ago, I began to realize that this whole struggle with depression, anxiety, and all of the ways that it factored into my life had started to make me heavily dependent on God, and I took very vivid mental note of that. I know that this is not everyone’s epiphany with journeys such as mine and the opposing result can be a sad one, but I feel truly blessed to be able to cling to that hope when the darkness rears its ugly head. So yeah, as the years have passed and my mental health has ebbed and flowed, I’ve continued to hold onto that bit of truth - in my darkest times, God has always come through. 

That realization has affected me in some profound ways. For one, rather than constantly crying out to God and asking for complete healing of all things mental, to simply ask for the provisions to weather the storm. I’ve also, even though this can be a lot more difficult to actually ask from the heart, taken it upon myself to actually ask God for some hard things occasionally in order to keep my eyes on Him. My somewhat selfish reasoning here is, if I ask for it, then at least I’ll be expecting it and God might hold back just a touch on the intensity (yeah, like I said, selfish human reasoning here), which should make it a little easier, right? I could sit here and go on another several thousand word dissertation on how God has continued to reveal the parts of things like anxiety in my life to create beauty in the small nuances of my personality, but for the sake of trying to get to the point I originally intended, I shall not. Suffice to say, when Paul talks about his “thorn in the flesh” and then goes on to express appreciation for it (2Cor. 12:9-10), I’ve come to the place of being able to truly adopt that as something I can joyously express myself. Now, let’s not get it twisted - if God were to take away the thing that pretty much on the daily causes my stomach to knot up, occasionally results in my heart doing weird butterfly things, and generally just causes my brain to feel like it's being fed a constant stream of nitrous (carheads, y'all will get this one), I ain’t gonna say no! But there’s honestly a part of me that truly doesn’t want to pray for a miracle in this area of my life any more, because, while it does not define me, something I was convicted of from a message at church months ago, it truly has influenced to a very great degree who I’ve become.

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So, now that we have the intricate details of the context for where my headspace has been regarding miracles of late, let's loop all the way back to Sunday morning. So I’m standing there, kinda not feeling the worship song choices as much this morning. Maybe it was because some of them weren’t on my “heavily played/I know these better than the back of my hand” playlist, maybe it was because I was still mentally journaling where I had been cut off a few minutes earlier when the service started. Either way, I’m standing there, trying my best to sorta coax my heart into the worship, when I start to realize the lyrics of the song that is starting - and my jaded, cynical brain starts to criticize it. Thoughts like “oh yeah, of course this is the kind of song Bethel would write, given that whole fiasco they had with the dead person a few months back…” and the like. But beyond that, I caught myself almost doubting the lyrics themselves; honestly, doubting how far God could actually go with His miraculous power.

But while standing there, being the doubting Thomas in church of all places, I felt a sense of conviction settle in. But not only that, I also felt a little bit of sadness. You see, the day before, I had finished up The Insanity of God during some solitude time at a local coffee shop and had read the story I mentioned earlier. I stood there in church, facing yet another form of unbelief in my theoretically supposed to be bulletproof faith, you know, given my having been raised in a Christian community by a Christian family with even the privilege of being a “good” Christian and spending a few years as a Missionary overseas.

But as I stood there, having yet another low-key crisis of faith, I recalled the story I recounted a few paragraphs earlier and was struck with the distinct realization that right in that moment, as I stood there in church for worship, I was experiencing a miracle. I didn’t need to see someone leap out of a wheelchair, have someone proclaim that their cancerous mass had disappeared, or have my anxiety evaporate - the miracle was the simple fact that I was surrounded by hundreds of other believers freely expressing their faith and adoration to God at the top of their lungs, without even the slightest fear of being bothered about it. Not even remotely an original profound epiphany, but I felt shivers as I stood there truly internalizing that realization.

I mentioned previously that a tinge of sadness also crept in as I stood there in worship, processing what was going on in my head and around me. The sadness was borne of the question that had sprouted as a result of my small thunderclap moment as I looked around. “How many of these people truly understand that a miracle is happening right now, and are simply waiting for some giant miracle to happen like cancer to disappear, an addict to miraculously be set free, or their mental health be fully restored? Who, like me, often miss the simple truth that daily, we’re experiencing an entire array of miracles, just by living?” Truly, in that moment of realizing that I was living a miracle right there in church, I wanted to shout the lyrics to “How Great Is Our God” til my voice gave out (and yeah, “How Great Is Our God - World Edition” has been on constant repeat for me since)! I wanted to jump around! There was an energy... strike that, the joy of the Lord that, in that moment, gave me the urge to do all the crazy dancing and carrying on right there in church that I had experienced at the churches in Africa while I lived there. I didn’t, though - some things you just probably shouldn’t do in American worship services, lest someone mistakenly attribute the cause of the erratic behavior to Amphetamines or something. I simply stood there and put my absolute heart and soul into the remainder of the worship service.

I find it hard to know how to wrap all this up. One, I, and practically everyone I’ve talked to that has also read the book, feel strongly that every. single. Christian. should read The Insanity of God (and, I’ve been told, The Insanity of Obedience - My copy is getting to my doorstep tomorrow and I couldn’t be more excited for an Amazon delivery). I can’t guarantee that God will speak to you or call you in the same way He did me as I read the book, but it has motivated, nay, convicted me in many areas of my life and has instilled an even deeper appreciation for the things I’ve been privileged to experience over the years.

Two, I would strongly encourage you, reader who somehow chose to make it this far in this ridiculously long dissertation, to intentionally explore the miracles that happen around you on a daily basis. You may not have grown up with an oddly warped definition of what a miracle is or a really blurred perspective on if or when they take place like I did, but there is something to be said for truly picking out the miracles that happen around you. A giddy joy comes over me whenever I recognize them and I hope the same happens for you. It has given me oh so much more appreciation for my God!

Three, it is true that, as I touched on earlier, popular Christianity places a lot of emphasis on the feel-good parts of faith, one of those being elaborate miracles and a sort of “faith in miracles” rather than a faith in God. However, speaking as someone who, while I no longer am a member of a defined Anabaptist church, the Anabaptist teachings and values that I grew up with still hold significance in my worldview and belief system. However, sometimes as a result, I’ve found personally anyways, some of these more “unpredictable” aspects of God’s power and Spirit tend to get brushed aside because they aren’t easily explained or defined. The way I adopted some of the plain perspective of these things warped my faith to a point where I doubted that miracles can or would happen to me or the people around me (oh to have a young, naive faith again, where, at 15 years old, I very innocently asked my dad why he wanted to travel to the US to the doctor to have his knee fixed rather than do the easy thing and pray for healing - I’m sad to say that’s not my default response these days and I wish it were).

My point is, there’s a tension here. On one hand, we can point fingers and shout “STOP HAVING FAITH IN MIRACLES RATHER THAN GOD”. On the other hand, we can get so caught up in living the safe life that we forget that our God can literally do anything, so what’s the harm in at least asking, right? Then there’s kinda the part that sometimes hurts to face - the fact that God does place hard things in our lives that, pray though we may for a miracle, He chooses to leave there, because His way is best and ultimately, He will use it for good. I say this with relative ease now, because I’ve experienced that. But I’m certain there will be times in the future where it will be hard to really internalize or appreciate that, be it in my personal struggle with mental health or some other thing that God chooses to drop on me. But, as Paul says, “{God’s} power is made perfect in weakness. Again, right now, I can say with full honesty that I experience joy when recounting the work that God has done in my life as the result of my battle, but I’ve been in a similar place before and the feeling doesn’t last forever. But emotion does not equate truth, so while in the future, Satan might turn up the dial a little on the intensity of the lies and I find myself struggling to sift through them, hopefully I remember to turn back to “brain dumps” like this, as well as my journal entries from the good times and be reminded of the truth.

I really don’t know if you got anything out of what I just wrote here. I’m not writing any of this in an effort to instill some sense of revival or evoke any epiphanies from any of you who actually make it here to the end. There’s a certain selfish wish I have sometimes that I could somehow convict others with my writing in the same way that I feel convicted or have those neat realizations when reading what others have written, but truthfully, this is the somewhat processed, but not nearly fully so, “brain dump” of something that has weighed heavily on my mind over the past few weeks. It’s been a weird personal journey that I felt would be worth sharing in my own way, and 3,800 words later, I still don’t feel like I fully conveyed the full effect or journey, but I hope that in some way, it might be at least somewhat intelligible. Anyways, I’ll leave it at that. God bless!

Michael Stoltzfus, 2021