I beleive in Miracles
Can you point to one moment, one instant in which you became someone else? An instant where your outlook, your priorities, even your basic perception of reality totally changed? I don't think most people can. But I can. If you had known me longer than you have, if you'd known me way back in my dark primordial past, you pri wouldn't recognize me. I don't even recognize me. I wasn't very academically-minded because I spent all my time either following the "in" crowd around trying to show them I was big and bad and tough, that I could beat up on kids and make their lives miserable just like they could, and thus I could be one of them; or backstabbing people and pushing everyone away because they could never REALLY understand what it was to be me, to face the injustices that I had to face. As time went on and my exclusion form the bully crowd grew more pronounced, I tended more towards the latter, taking a perverse sort of pleasure from being better than everyone else, from causing them pain and reminding them that they were unworthy of anything but my scorn. The whole world deserved only my scorn, because of what it had done to me, because of the cards it had dealt me. To me, everything was darkness and futility--there was no way out, so I may as well take everyone else with me.
But it's true that God knows His own, and watches over them, and smacks them a good one when they need it. IN my case, He had to strike me mute for a month, an interminably long month where no one spoke with or interacted with me, and often no one even noticed me. Looking back, it's kind of funny, because that was something I'd often do to perturb people, just sit quietly, unmoving, unblinking, unresponsive, and stare at someone, stare until you could see their puny little thoughts and awareness and entire being waver and finally break, unable to evade your attention.
During that month (I'd almost swear it was much longer) I had a lot of time to myself to think about things, to analyze my whole entire world (that is, me). I realized there was a little gulf in the back of me, a certain feeling that something vitally important was missing, that I felt somehow incomplete, though I couldn't say how or quite what was missing. I also did something I'd never really done before--I prayed. Nothing big or fancy with incomprehensible words and phrasings and lots of "eths" and "ests", I just talked to God. See, I'd never really question the existence of a god out there somewhere, it just kind of seemed right to me, but I'd never really considered that His existence had any bearing on me. I just talked and talked, talking myself to a point where I started to understand things, like that my immediate problems might just be a small part of something much larger, and that God/the universe might have a REASON for causing/allowing these things to happen to me.
I thought about the many variations of the little prayer they always ask you to pray along with in Sunday School if you feel like, the Sinner's Prayer, I've heard it called. I thought about what it really meant, that to pray it I had to fully understanding and admit that I was worthless and evil in my own right, that I couldn't blame the world or my circumstances or say that other people were worse than I was. That I could have nowhere to hide, that I'd have to come out into the open and face it all, and accept it without excuse. I don't know that I ever prayed it in so many words, but I did fully realize how undeserving of ANYTHING good I was, and I was sorry, I was sorry with all my heart and soul.
That's when God Spoke to me. With some people, He speaks using actual words. To some He gives Signs. I rather suspect that for each person it's different, but since He created us, He knows how best to talk to us. For me, He puts a really strong, powerful impulse in me, and in such a way that some inner part of me recognizes it immediately as a message from God. Our conversations are usually a little more two-sided, but in this case, all He said was for me to go find me a bible and get myself baptized. :-3
And, it's funny. A few weeks later I could talk again and was mostly recovered from my ordeal. But there was something different inside of me. I dunno what else to call it except "hope", though I didn't really feel hopeless before. I was also newly conscious of the fact that there is more than one choice in any situation, and that the choice I make can and often will affect other people. That I'm not forced to do something and at any time I can stop or chose to do something else. Something better. But I think the biggest change of all was something that can be nothing else but a miracle: I was suddenly aware of other people, emotionally. I could tell how they were feeling, and some deep inner part of me that I cannot possibly explain understood WHY they were feeling that way, and what could be done to change that. I call it a direct act of divine intervention because before my mute episode, I had never really felt much emotion at all. Feelings were a silly, incomprehensible half- fairy tail clung to by other people to justify their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. I'd never rally felt much of anything myself, and certainly never any sort of strong, overriding emotion. Now not only was I feeling it all, but I was understanding the why of it, and even able to understand and kind of experience the emotions of others. It should have mad me absolutely crazy, and sometimes it felt like it had, but I also suddenly had a capacity to deal with it all, and a kind of "big picture" perspective of it all.
I've learned so much since then, about the role of Jesus had in Salvation, about what it really means to be a follower of Christ, and a gazillion church-ese words that often have only the vaguest of implications. But that's all fluff and icing, pretty meaningless beside the sheer power and, well, transformation of that moment when Jari was born.