It seems to me that people get farther and farther away from God with each passing day.

I read some of the drivel on Facebook and see some of the total muck on TV and I wonder.  People seem to be depending on themselves for way too much, and to me, there are so many of us who have just given up and have very little hope in anything.  

So forgive me, but let me go ahead and tell you a couple of stories. One I’ve told countless times and one is new. But there are stories like these that happen every day, both on a grand scale and on more simple scales as well.

When my baby daughter was 2 months old, the pediatrician (thankfully) witnessed her having a seizure. She was taken to the hospital later and the scan showed she had a mass in her head near her spinal cord.  The neurologist, who was world-renowned (thankfully), told us he was 99 percent sure that the tumors were benign.

They weren’t.  

Later, we found out that our daughter’s brain cancer was the slow-growing kind: sort of like ivy that grows slowly and digs in as it grows.  

This was not an easy cancer to have.

What followed were two brain operations, along with 14 months of chemo. At the end of those 14 months and before she turned 2 years old, my daughter was declared cancer free.  

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. We weren’t supposed to have her around for long, and the doctors were stunned, to say the least.

It was a miracle. Yes, we had great doctors. Yes, we had superb medical advantages. But even the docs will tell you this cancer was not supposed to react this way. Plus, I will tell you that there were people, literally, all around the world who were lifting us up in prayer constantly.  

It was a miracle.  

My friend had a stroke a few weeks ago. It seemed he was a goner for a little while, but four days after he had the stroke, he was in church service playing the piano. I wish I could write that in all caps. He was playing the piano!  Sure, he has a few side effects from the stroke, but he is a walking miracle.  

He is a miracle.  

My daughter is now 22 and is almost finished with college. She is beautiful, has a full head of curly hair (chemo caused her to be bald for the first few months of her life), and gets good grades. She has no side effects and the memories of brain cancer are long gone, if she ever had any.

My friend is living a full life, totally paying attention to what God has given him, and is giving God all the praise and glory for it all.  He has a sense of humor, is lively and jumping around like he always was.

I don’t care if other people praying for you offends you. I don’t care if you don’t believe in any of it. It’s real. Prayer works.  

Miracles are happening every day.

We often go along in life trying to do it all on our own, regardless of the degree of faith we have or even if we don’t have a faith. We are humans who think, often, that we have the bull by the horns and can tackle any problem.

Unfortunately, it sometimes takes a near catastrophe to get our attention and remind us what is real, what is true, what is of God.  

So, if you are struggling with your beliefs, I urge you to at least go on a journey of reading or searching.  None of us who believe are any better than you are and I will tell you, I can totally understand why we sometimes decide to do things on our own or question whether we think God cares about us.  

I can see how life’s circumstances may cause us to give up or decide we have no hope.

But as I said above, it’s all real. I have a person I know who was a self-proclaimed atheist for many, many years. Just recently, this person has completed a spiritual journey and is a praying, Bible-reading person who has completely changed the way he thinks about things.

Miracles. They happen all the time.