God’s Miracles Today

This post is about three miracles that God performed in my life between April and August 2024. I call the first miracle ‘The Miracle of the Photographs’. Jesus told me this is a water-to-wine type of miracle. The second miracle I call ‘The Miracle of a Healed Heart’. The third miracle is ‘The Miracle of Stopping the Storm’. Some Christians believe Jesus’ miracles ended in the first century after the original Disciples plus Paul died. This post describes real miracles that point to God working miraculously among His people (well, me) today. I still don’t know why God showed me these miracles, except maybe to encourage me in my healing/deliverance ministry and to show me His mightly power. So, here they are, described in detail.

The Miracle of the Photographs

I regularly get out of bed between 3 and 4 AM, go into our living room, sit in my stuffed orange chair, pray, listen to worship music with my headphones, and read my Bible. When I get out of bed, I put on a shirt hanging on the closet door. I don’t care which shirt it is; whichever one is hanging is the one I grab in the dark (I don’t turn on a light so as not to wake my wife). I walk into the living room, sit in my chair, and begin to pray. Generally, I begin to pray something like this, “Good morning, Father; good morning, Jesus; good morning Holy Spirit. On this day, April 28, 2024, I felt the Lord tell me to kneel. I got up out of the chair, I kneeled facing the chair, with my arms resting on the cushion of the chair. As I was praying, I felt some paper stuck between the chair cushion and the left arm of the chair, now on my right side. I pulled the paper out, turned on the light next to the chair, and saw it was a photograph of my daughter taken at her elementary school in 1986, when she was 6 years old. What a shock! It was a wallet-sized picture, the type taken by a professional photographer in elementary schools and offered to parents to buy in various sizes. I hadn’t seen that picture in years. My daughter is 44 years old now. “Well”, I thought, “perhaps it fell out of my wife’s Bible when she was sitting in this chair”. Later, when I asked her about it, she was just as surprised as I was. “Strange”, I thought. But the miracle was not over.

A few minutes after finding my daughter’s photograph tucked ibetween the cushion and arm of the chair, I heard the Lord telling me to get up and sit in the chair. By now it was close to 3:30 AM. I sat down in the chair and immediately felt something in the breast pocket of my shirt. I reached into the pocket and - surprise. I found another wallet-sized photograph. This was one of my son, taken the same time (1986), in the same elementary school when my son was about 4-years old. This was really a surprise. I hadn’t seen this photo in years also, but here it was in my pocket. I promise you, there was no photo in my pocket when I took the shirt off the hook in the closet door 30 minutes ago!

These two photographs were not in my possession anytime in the last 10 years. Yet, there they were. As I was wondering about what had just happened, I heard the Lord say, “This is a water to wine miracle”, referring to Jesus turning water to wine at the wedding feast in Cana (John 2). I still don’t know what the Lord was trying to tell me. Both of my children are fine.

The Miracle of a Healed Heart

I periodically have atrial fibrillation. I generally lasts less than 12 hours. It is annoying, but not life threatening. But in early June 2024 I had an episode of atrial fibrillation that lasted 72 hours. During this time my pulse rate varied between 98 bpm up to 138 bpm, with an average rate of 115 bpm. My resting heart rate is 62 bpm. Throughout the 72 hours, my heart beat was irregular. I woke up on June 5 at 1:30 PM with an irregular heart beat of 118 bpm. I got out of bed, went into the living room, sat in my orange chair, and cried out to God. I was considering going to the emergency room when God said, “Pray for your heart to be healed”. I prayed against a spirit of infirmity and commanded my heart beat to drop and a normal rhythm to be restored. I have a smart watch that records my heart rate and sends it to my phone. I also did some personal deliverance, including breaking off any curses that might have been put on me. Within a minute after the deliverance, my heart rate dropped to 59 bpm with a normal rhythm. I have a screen shot of the heart-rate display on my phone. After 72 hours of a fib, prayer healed my heart, at least for the next 3 months. From that moment, until August 24 I had no atrial fibrillation. Since August 24, I have had periodic a fib, but generally with prayer it converts to normal rhythm. Looking back at this miracle, I asked myself why I didn’t pray for healing sooner. I am not sure. Perhaps it was because God wanted to show me a miracle.

The Miracle of Stopping the Storm

On August 3, 2024 I married my sister. It’s not what you think. My sister asked me to officiate at her wedding. So, I performed the wedding ceremony at 3:00 PM on the point of our property on the shore of Owasco Lake in the Finger Lakes in New York State. She wanted an outdoor wedding. A tent was set up just in case it rained, but her heart was set on getting married surrounded by friends, family, and the lake on the point. There was a 70% chance of rain that day in our location. I watched the weather radar all morning as a strong storm system inexorably and rapidly moved over northern Ohio, northern and central Pennsylvania, and was locked onto our little point in Central NY. It was not looking good for a wedding on the point. The sky was dark gray, and it was beginning to mist at 2:30 PM. My niece Liz’s husband, John, and I had prayed earlier in the day, commanding the storm to break up, in Jesus’ name, but it looked like our prayer didn’t have any effect. At 3 PM I huddled with John and the best man. We decided to go for it. We called all the wedding guests to pick up their chairs and head out to the point. And then we had a wonderful wedding ceremony. I preached about the meaning of “Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself”. I pointed out that you love your neighbor when you make the relationship about their wants, needs, and desires, not yours. It was a beautiful setting; everything was perfect. Cloudy, but no rain. The ceremony lasted 20 minutes. I got so caught up on the message that I forgot about the weather. When it was over I checked the weather radar again and was stunned by what I saw.

The storm system that I had watched move east across the northern Ohio and Pennsylvania as a giant blob of rain split in two 20 miles west of us. The lower part of the system kept moving east. But not the upper part that should have passed over us about 3 PM. Instead, the radar map showed that the ‘blob’ was now a vertical line of rain that stopped just miles from us as if it had hit a wall! I have a screen shot of the radar map on my phone. If I can figure out how to get the screen shot from my phone onto the computer, I’ll put it in this post. We had no rain at all, except for a few minutes of misting. An hour or so later, the sky began to clear and it became a beautiful day. I guess some would say we were lucky. But we prayed for this to happen, and it did. I call it a miracle.

Those are the three miracles. The first happened on April 28, 2024; the second on June 5, 2024; and the third on August 3, 2024. Perhaps there is a significance to these dates. I haven’t thought about that.

I am still wondering about these three miracles. Did each of them have particular significance or meaning apart from the obvious that God still performs miracles, that He is Lord over time, space, and matter; over our bodies, and over the weather. If He can make photographs appear when none were there before, if He can stop atrial fibrillation in a few seconds and restore my heart to a normal rhythm, and if He can command the weather, then He is capable of anything in our lives and the world around us. I didn’t ask for the first miracle. It was a total surprise. The second and third miracles were answers to prayer. Prayer works! It was all God.

One more observation. If the first miracle is like the water-to-wine miracle in John 2, then the next two miracles generally follow the order of types of miracles in John’s Gospel. After water-to-wine miracle, Jesus healed the Officials son in John 4 and the invalid at the pool of Bethesda in John 5. After feeding the 5000, Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee recorded in Matthew 14 and John 6. I am not sure if the order of miracles I observed roughly corresponding to the order of similar miracles in John’s Gospel has any significance, but I struck by the similarity. Perhaps this is part of the miracle.

In my life, these types of miracles are not common. For some reason, with these three miracles, God reached into the events of this world and shifted them in accordance with His will. We still get sick and the weather still causes catastrophes. But in the midst of these difficulties, we find other types of miracles — we see God protecting and providing. God is a God of the unusual and unexpected. We should walk in wonder and awe of God every day. In fact, we should ask for more wonder. Too often we put God in a box and say, “He doesn’t do that anymore”. That’s wrong!

While these miracles were amazing to me, and they are on the order of some of Jesus’ and the Disciples miracles in the New Testament, they are peanuts compared to the greatest miracles of all — the resurrection of Jesus and the fact that Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and our Father dwell within the heart of each born-again believer. Jesus died on the cross for humanity. After all, Jesus desires all people to be saved, although not all will accept His offer of salvation.

“It is good and pleasing to God our savior, who wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, who gave Himself as a ransom for all men” (1 TImothy 2: 3 — 6 NIV).

Our Father, who can make photographs appear where there were none before, heal me physically, and stop a storm from ruining a wedding, can do a miracle of salvation in your heart, if you will let Him. Trust Him. He is not only powerful, He is kind, merciful, and good as well. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient — He is the Lord God Almightly, Creator and King of the Universe, the God for all people and all time. God is love. Trust Him with your life. He will never forsake or abandon you if you believe and keep on believing.