Acts 3:15
You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this. [Peter to the crowd in Solomon’s Colonnade]
There is some responsibility that comes with witnessing a miracle. A miracle is not a particularly private matter. It is most powerful and amazing for the beneficiary of the miracle, of course, but there is also power in the story. The witness must tell what he/she saw, heard, or felt. This testimony spreads the wonder of that miracle.
Miracles are not accidental. They are intentionally divine.
How can we know why a miracle occurs one day and not the next? We cannot. It’s not our job to figure that out. It’s just our job to report.
When the disciples witnessed the living Christ after Calvary, they could not stop themselves from telling the story. They told everyone they encountered and eventually, those stories cost them their lives. After some years, all of those firsthand witnesses were gone and the next generation of followers were telling the story second and third hand and on into the hundreds of thousands of retellings. We will never know how embellished the stories have become … or worse, what fantastic elements of the story have been lost. In any case, the essence remains the same: Christ died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
One of the reasons the Jews continued their traditions of feast days and holy days was to relive, retell, and remember the miraculous stories of their own captivity and salvation.
If we don’t speak the stories, they are lost. We forget. Even a great miracle, over time, can become lost.
In my own life I have survived automobile accidents inexplicably; I have seen dramatic healings; I have received money “in the nick of time” to meet a financial need; I have heard prophetic utterances that revealed truths out of my past that could not have been known otherwise. In most of these cases, I confess, I have stopped telling the stories.
Forgive me Lord. From this day forward, I accept the responsibility of the witness. And when the next miracle blazes across my path again, I will remember. I will tell the story. I will be faithful to your trust.
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