I Didn’t Believe in Miracles, Until One Happened During Bible Study

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I wasn’t confident that miracles were something that happened today. Not really. Until one night, we were gathered in a rented classroom, having just started a church in panic and in prayer.

We didn’t have a space for midweek Bible study, but our gathering was attracting enough attention that it wouldn’t fit in my living room. It was just supposed to be a small Bible study, but it became a standing-room-only gathering.

We read from the Book of Acts — we were starting a church, lower case “c,” might as well figure out how they started the Church, capital “C.” I noted, “They seemed to see a lot of miracles back then. Why don’t we see that today?” Everyone “Hmmed.”

A man in the front row, a medical doctor, raised his hand.

“Jim, I think God wants me to pray for someone.”

“That’s nice,” I said. I wasn’t about to have God interrupt my Bible study.

“No, I mean someone in this room right now.”

“Oh,” I said. I wasn’t sure where this was going.

“The Lord is telling me that someone in this room is having trouble closing his left hand all the way.”

I thought to myself – You should have said back pain. You definitely would have gotten someone with back pain. Yours was way too specific. But before I could ruin the moment, a man in the back of the room blurted out, “Oh, that’s me!”

All eyes turned on him.

“I hurt my hand like 20 years ago, and I’ve never been able to close my left hand all the way since then. It doesn’t bother me much; I’m just always aware of it.”

“Ok,” I said to the doctor. “Why don’t you go pray for him?”

I went on with the Bible study, not sure what to make out of all that. I didn’t know how to follow up. I hadn’t grown up in a church that talked about the supernatural in anything but a historical context.

The next day, I phoned the guy at the back of the room.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, “but I can close my hand all the way now. I haven’t been able to do that in 20 years. And the strangest thing was that right when that guy started talking (they didn’t know each other, and he had forgotten the doctor’s name), I felt this warm sensation moving up through my body from my feet to the top of my head. I honestly didn’t care about anything else at that moment – I just didn’t want that feeling to stop.”

His hand was healed permanently. We’ve never forgotten that moment.

For the skeptics, I don’t know what to tell you, except I am the most skeptical and unlikely pastor there is. I didn’t grow up with a charismatic kind of Christianity, and I had largely ruled out the supernatural as a distant fantasy or historical reality now long stopped. But I saw it right in front of my eyes, and attempts to explain this away through natural causes seem to me rather desperate. Occam’s razor wins out here.

I know what it feels like to be unsure of what I believe in, and I know what it feels like to believe in some basic metaphysical reality, but find stories like this odd. What this experience made me do was lean into prayer. The Bible says that Jesus can do more than we can ask or imagine, so now I pray with that in mind. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

If you know someone who might be encouraged by this story, feel free to forward it along!

© James W. Miller