JoltinJoe wrote:First, there are claims of angels appearing today. There was a great article in Time magazine some years ago about it. And then there are the accounts of the Battle of Mons in 1914 -- if St. Michael and an army of angels did not intervene, then this incident represents a serious case of collective delusion, given how many English troops claim to have witnessed the intervention. Granted, the whole incident can be viewed as fictitious, but still, it is a legend which has certainly taken on a life of its own with many witnesses insisting they saw the intervention.
Second, miracles occur every day. In fact, I know someone who is experiencing a rather miraculous recovery from a surgical procedure after receiving the Anointing of the Sick from a priest -- a priest who had previously performed the Anointing of the Sick on a brain cancer patient. Immediately, her cancer went into remission and disappeared. In the more recent case, the patient's doctors are saying his recovery from an intrusive intestinal surgery seems "inexplicable" in that he is demonstrating digestive functionality the doctors deemed nearly impossible. The prior case was widely reported when it occurred some years back.
Keep in mind there is likely a rational explanation for what is called a "miracle" -- it is just that our learning and knowledge has progressed to the point of explaining the cause or reason of the cure. For example, just as we don't know what the "trigger" is which causes many illnesses or diseases, we don't know whether there is a "trigger" which might cause a cure. The cancer patient mentioned above was immediately placed on a multi-hour flight, flying in excess of 35,000 feet for several hours, to undergo ground-breaking treatment being performed at a highly specialized hospital. Did the flight "trigger" a cause? If it did, we don't know why. However, perhaps the miracle was that God placed her in circumstances which -- unknown to man -- trigger a remission of brain cancer.
Not sure if you know or remember, but my wife was in her third year of post cancer, when she went in for a scheduled CT scan and was told that her cancer had returned to her lungs. Cancer coming back to the lungs is the beginning of the end. I remember being told there was nothing they could do for her and thinking I was going to cash in my 401K and fly to Europe for any sort of crazy treatment in the hopes it would spur on some sort of immune response and defeat the cancer. I remember walking down the hallway at the U of Washington Medical Center thinking I was not ready for this.
We sent out our requests for prayers and had what I would guess conservatively as 500 people praying for Jenny.
After the surgery to remove the cancerous nodule, the thoracic surgeon came out and told me, "your wife didn't have cancer, she had an infection in her lungs".
To me that was a prayer answered and to some extent, a miracle. The doctor who told Jenny that her lung cancer had returned, to this day, swears it was a cancerous nodule. This is a man who has seen thousands of CT scans and can pretty much read them with a great amount of accuracy.
I don't care if it was an infection. All I know is that I prayed for my wife to have not had the cancer returned. My prayer was answered.
Jenny today, as gorgeous as ever.
