I believe in miracles.

(Hi there! Yes, it’s been about a billion years since I’ve written anything here. A big shout out to everyone still hanging in there with me and reading this, thank you! I said last time–I think–I was going a bit quiet because I needed to finish the rewrites on my novel, and I wrote “the end” about an hour ago now, so maybe it’s time. Anyway, hello!)

I’ve not ever had a problem with faith, or with waiting in ridiculous hope for things that seem impossible. I have a gift, and that gift is believing in impossible things.

Mostly.

But even my faith has been tested of late. Not in an I-don’t-know-what-I-think-about-God-any-more kind of way, but in that getting-older sense of life isn’t infinite, not here, and sometimes dreams do have to die, and sometimes people do have to die, and that’s the way of it really, even though we spend our childhoods believing in the miraculous infiniteness of our own selves, our own potential, our own existence.

We grow old. We grow up.

Sometimes we don’t see the things we’ve believed in. Sometimes prayers don’t get answered. And sometimes the answer is “no”. Sometimes it’s “wait”, but the waiting is endless.

Hope is hard.

Don’t get me wrong, the four impossible things I’ve believed before breakfast aren’t life and death matters, no matter how much they break my heart. I am fine, we are fine, we are all fine. So many of my friends aren’t fine though, not right now, and this post is for them, to say only one thing–even if I am going about it in a long and round-about way–to say that I Believe In Miracles.

I said a prayer the other night. Don’t get me wrong, I do do this praying thing fairly regularly, but this one the other night, lying, for some reason, on my older son’s bottom bunk, was different. It wasn’t at all faith-filled or hopeful, it was just plain honest. Dear God. This is my impossible situation. It breaks my heart. I can’t ever see any way of it changing. And my friends with the broken hearts and the broken lives who need miracles too? Remember them? Please help us all. Amen.

That was it.

Funnily, I felt better. Sometimes, apparently, it’s almost as nice to be honest as it is to be hopeful. I didn’t think too much about it any more, but having said it felt good. Having acknowledged that I could not achieve any kind of miracle felt good. Having acknowledged my hope-lessness felt good, too.

And then, the next day, the first little miracle happened.

I won’t tell you about it, and even if I did explain the whole situation and the heartbreak and the hopelessness you probably wouldn’t understand it, not like I do, so I won’t try here. But what happened was a miracle, all the same, and as unexpected and as hope-filled as any miracle can be.

There’s this story in the Bible, in the Old Testament, where there was this phenomenal drought, and it hadn’t rained in just about forever, and this prophet guy (probably Elijah, but it could have been his buddy Elisha) prayed for rain. He prayed and he prayed, and then after some kind of eternity he saw this tiniest, teeniest little cloud on the horizon, and he legs it as fast as he can back to…oh, whoever it was…and he says this, this most important thing ever: “RUN! RUUUUUUN!!!! BECAUSE THE RAIN IS GOING TO OVERTAKE YOU!”

It makes me cry, that bit. Because it did.

I’m praying for a number of friends today, all needing miracles in a rain that overtakes them. I’ve seen the itty-bitty raincloud, and right now I’m filled with hope.

I believe in miracles. I believe in the power of hope, and in impossible things before breakfast. And today, if you need something impossible in the face of doubt, I will believe for a miracle for you, too.