It's a miracle to me.

I woke up last night… another bad dream. A living nightmare actually. It’s the same one… me, my brother, and my parents.

I found myself wondering, why do people have children? Parents have this enormous responsibility… they are the first to shape their child’s worldview. Whatever your parents taught you the first few years of your life… their values, their dreams, their failures, their expectations… are what their child will spend the rest of his life walking though. I find myself thinking, I don’t want kids, I don’t want to mess them up… all I want them to know is that they are loved. They only thing that matters is if they know they are loved. This is all changing my perspective of what this upcoming “judgment day” might look like… I sincerely doubt Jesus will sit there, on His mighty throne and say “why didn’t you obey Me? Why didn’t you do this or that… lets review everything you did wrong and could have done better every day you were alive…” NO. The Jesus I want to know, the Jesus worth following and believing in… I really think would say, “Didn’t you know that I love you?”

He’ll look into the eyes of the girl that grew up by herself and see her wounded heart and the baggage that she carries, and I think His heart would have to have some sadness in it. That it’s finally the end… and this creature that He created to be so beautiful never believed, never knew, that He loved her. He’ll look into the eyes of the wealthy business man who built his own career up from nothing by himself, and say “All I wanted was to live with you.”

That’s it. No rules, no expectations, no hidden agendas. It doesn’t matter if you go to church or read the Bible, whether you go to college or if you’re polite… He’s known plenty of Christians who never did do any of these. Do you know that He loves you? Look it up for yourself, the prodigal son wasn’t polite, and he didn’t follow the rules. The prostitutes on the street most definitely didn’t go to college. And the most trusted disciples didn’t have a single Bible.

So I return to my brother and find myself crying now. Doesn’t he know the He loves him? I cry out to Jesus… “Where are You? Why aren’t You here?” And
I hear Him say, “But I already am.” I think of the picture of my brother that I saw last week, his football picture, and the youthfulness of his face. This boy that I share not even a drop of blood with, yet I feel so connected to. I would give my life in a second for him to know that he’s loved… and even as that thought crosses my mind, I heard Him say, “So would I.”

All I can do is cry… sob. I lay at the feet of Jesus and I grab His robe and just cry. I imagine myself thousands of year ago, when Jesus lived on earth. He walks by and the crowds are following Him, as they did in the typical Bible stories… and I run out to just grab on. Somehow I think that just holding on to Him is enough. And so I sit at the feet of Jesus and I grab His robe and just cry.

“Come to my brother, he needs You.” I tell Jesus… and I wait for His response. I want Him to respond like He did in the stories… I want to hear Him say Yes and see Him go. I wait in my bed as I cry for an answer… begging to hear anything, a word… I want to believe Jesus cares, that He’s already on His way to him, my brother. Instead my mind flashes to something else… my heart stops and I’m in a hospital… there’s a doctor over me saying, “It’s a miracle you’re here.”

“It’s a miracle you’re here.”

Jesus didn’t say yes this morning… I didn’t see Him walk towards my brother, or even move for that matter. What I did hear, was a reminder. It’s a miracle I’m here today. Of course I’m not in a hospital, my heart didn’t stop and then start again… but the message was clear. Jesus does not work in the ways that I understand. He moves in a dimension that I cannot yet know… He’s working a miracle in my brother’s life that I cannot yet see… yet somehow I must believe that the miracle is happening… b/c it happened to me, its happened to others around me… it will happen to him.

And so I laid there w/ my hand outstretched… desperate to touch His hand… to feel His touch… and my hand fell back on my head. Not yet. Someday. At that moment I realized I had cried myself into a headache…. And now its time to get up.