12/17/00
Let There Be Lights
Around this time of the year, I start looking for miracles. For
instance, it’s a miracle if all the Christmas lights I put away
last year are still working when I plug them in this year. That
sort of miracle.
It’s a good example of the fact that too often we look for miracles
in all the wrong places.
I just received a holiday wake-up note from a publisher that a
little hard-cover book I wrote several years ago has, finally,
gone out of print.
It’s OK; the book, “Small Miracles, Extraordinary Stories of Ordinary
People Touched by God” (Zondervan, 1996), had a good run. There’s
a book-writing truism: Lots of books sell a few hundred copies
over their lifetime. And a very few books sell millions. But a
book that sells over 10,000 is considered a pretty decent success.
The good news is that “Small Miracles” sold in excess of 15,000.
The bad news is that I haven’t written anything to replace it
yet. Oh, well. There’s goes a little chunk of retirement.
But we’re always looking for miracles. “Small Miracles” told the
stories of scores of people who believed that God had touched
them in a special way, was present to them somehow. You know,
miracles with a small “m.” As opposed to Miracles, big “M.”
I guess I learned in writing that book—actually reporting on what
people told me they experienced—that a miracle isn’t necessarily
what happens to someone, but rather whether they see in what happened
the hand of God.
But look for miracles, we certainly do.
Standing at the store checkout the other day I leafed through
a copy of one of those “supermarket tabloid” newspapers, you know,
the ones with all the weird stuff. I spotted several ads for products
claiming a miraculous connection. One was for a piece of “prayer
cloth” supposed to channel God’s energy to you. Another was peddling
a vial of “holy water” with a Madonna-like statue in it. And they
sell like hotcakes. Just send money; get your miracle by return
mail. Right.
The older I get, the more I realize that we indeed do look for
miracles in all the wrong places. And then we sometimes miss the
real ones.
I’ll try to keep that in mind as Christmas approaches. That holy
night, not whether all the lights work, is what a miracle is really
all about.
—Tom Sheridan, editor and general manager
[email protected]
—Tom Sheridan,
Editor and General Manager
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