The Most Important Miracle: The Curse of Familiarity

Say what you want about the movie, but I love the book Watchmen. God's spoken to me so much through it and that's honestly one of my favorite parts about God because the things God has shown me have absolutely nothing to do with the author's original intent (go new criticism!).

In the second to last issue of Watchmen, Laurie is trying to convince the godlike Dr. Manhattan to come back to earth to save it from destruction. His speech about why he chooses to come back is beautiful. I'll share much of it in full:

"Thermodynamic miracles...events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive, meeting, siring this precise son, that exact daughter...to distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, is like turning air to gold. That is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle...But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget. I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away." (Emphasis mine)

I think that salvation is God's favorite miracle. That's why He does it so much. But, sadly, if we see something amazing enough, it grows dull to us and we lose interest. Like a new toy on Christmas morning that is all but forgotten when the time comes to open presents the next year.

I remember my reaction to hearing Clayton's story of 2,000 students accepting Christ, or being at Fuse in Anderson when 100 students accepted Christ, or hearing Joe Sangl tell us that nearly 6,000 people had accepted Christ in a NewSpring service since we started. I clapped and cheered, but I fear that I cheered only because that's what you're supposed to do. I know that my heart has grown hard to the miracle of salvation.

We can't afford to get used to the unusual. We should never just expect this miracle. It's a blessing every time it happens, no matter in what magnitude it may come, be it one person or a million. This apathy to the abnormal in my heart seems to come from this expectancy that God will always save souls, like He owes us that. But this just paints me as a spoiled child who feels entitled to the very things that I'm bored with.

God doesn't owe us salvation. He doesn't owe us a single one. That's the beauty, that's the miracle. That's the thing that takes the breath away that we need to view with new eyes. That a perfect and holy God would pick out even one of His enemies who willfully murdered His Son and instead of punishing that person justly, He adopts him or her as His child. And then He continues to overly bless us by doing the same thing with millions and possibly even billions of others. God's love is gorgeous.

I pray that God would renew our hearts. That he would remove the callous on our hearts and instead leave us with a tenderness there to not just act the way we're supposed to act towards Him, but to react out of a childlike heart, happy to see his Daddy work.