Do You Believe in Miracles?

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by Harry Kraus

A true story: (recounted in J.P. Moreland’s Kingdom Triangle, a report from Paul Eshleman, director of Campus Crusade’s Jesus film project.)

In the state of Bihar, India, there is a notoriously anti-Christian tribe called the Malto. When a crew with Campus Crusade’s Jesus film attempted to schedule a showing there in 1998, they were strongly rebuffed. A few days later, a 16-year-old Malto girl died. But that evening, just as her parents were about to bury her, she came back to life. As an awed crowd gathered around her, she told them that the God of the film crew had sent her back for several days “to tell as many people as I can that He is real.” The girl and her mother went searching, and the next day, they found the crew in a nearby village and invited them back for a showing. For seven days she told her story in every village they could get to, drawing large crowds for the film. Hundreds of people became Christians and started churches. After seven days the girl still looked fine, but she collapsed and died once again.

Why tell that story here on this Christian fiction blog?

Because, as fiction writers, I think we sometimes carry a bias against the miraculous, at least in our fiction. We are trained to make a story believable, and to avoid coincidence or crazy-divine miraculous because the reader just won’t buy it.

I know in my day to day life as a surgeon, I’m trained to think like a scientist and in that respect, I’m biased against the miraculous.

Maybe you need a miracle. God is powerful. When it serves His purposes to step outside our scientific understanding, He’ll do it.

And I just wanted to remind you that we serve a miracle-working God.

Don’t let your work bias bleed over into your personal faith walk with our miracle working Father!

Respectfully,
Harry

Lip ReadingBoard Certified surgeon, Harry Kraus, is the best selling author of 19 books. He served for most of a decade in East Africa as a missionary, a place where the miraculous happens. His latest novel, Lip Reading, was released in May.

Comments 0

  1. Sometimes we forget that the scientific method, with its foundation resting on a set of metaphysical presuppositions, can only reach that very small subset of all truth subtended by those presuppositions. That subset of truth is limited in scope and nature, yet many people treat science as the only source of truth, and so they rule out metaphysics, including the type of logic we use to evaluate what we read in the Bible and what we observe in life.
    Of course, miracles are beyond scientific validation, but so is most truth. A true critical thinker would never box themselves in by limiting truth only to evidence provided by the scientific method.
    As writers we should be good critical thinkers, and such thinking does not rule out miracles, unless we can rule out God. And that’s something no one can do — ruling out the infinite … illogical and impossible, unless your knowledge is infinite.
    All we need to do when we use miracles in our stories is to do a good job of binding them to the nature and character of God. Though He does not run roughshod over personal volition to squelch all evil or to force everyone to do good, His miracles can, and often do, flow out of His love, mercy and grace. We’re free to illustrate that in our stories.

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