Typically, people think science and miracles are at odds. That’s what I once thought. But in fact, it’s only within the regularity of science that God can reveal Himself to us mirac­ulously. It is science that makes miracles possible. It’s only because scientifically virgins don’t get pregnant that God can reveal Him­self in a virgin birth. It’s only because scientifically people don’t rise from the dead that God can reveal Himself through a resurrection. And likewise, God can reveal Himself in each of our lives.

The more I talk with people, the more convinced I am that the experience of miracles is universal. I like asking people, even the most scientific of people, “Have you ever had an experience that made you think there might be a God?” Usually there is an awkward lull and then some nervous laughter, but, if you wait long enough, almost without fail the person will say, “Well, there was this one time when…” And then they will tell you a remarkable story that has God’s signature all over it!

Most of the people I speak to have amazing stories, but they’re worried that they are the only one. They’re worried that others will think they’re weird. They start to wonder if maybe it’s all just in their heads. We need to share our stories, and we need to invite others to share their stories as well.

Here’s a story of seeing God’s finely tuned design in an individual life. A student from China showed up at a university open forum where I was speaking. One of my colleagues, Daniel, greeted her, and she said her name was “Alva.” My colleague replied, “That’s an interesting name; what does it mean?” Alva responded, “It means ‘by grace washed white as snow.’”

Daniel’s eyes went wide, and he asked Alva if she was a Chris­tian. She said, “No, not at all.” Daniel said, “Do you realize that your name is basically the heart of the Christian message?” She had no idea; she had just chosen this for her English name because she liked the sound of it.

Daniel began to explain the Christian message to her, and she was increasingly being drawn to God. Then the talk started, and halfway through the talk I quoted and put up on a PowerPoint slide, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). Daniel excitedly tapped the shoulder of Alva, who looked astonished and said, “I told you; that’s your name!”

At the end of the talk, Daniel and another of our colleagues con­tinued to explain to Alva the love that God has for her and the sacri­fice that God made for her. Alva decided she wanted to be a Christian, and my friends had the supreme privilege of praying with her to affirm that commitment.

There is one more detail to the story that fills me with awe. My talk for that night was already typed and printed before the week began, and the PowerPoint was done. But at lunchtime of that same day, my wife, Jo, and I had a distinct sense that something was miss­ing from the talk. So we rushed home after a lunchtime event, and we added just one additional handwritten page to the talk and just one additional PowerPoint slide.

What did that slide read? Isaiah 1:18: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” God beautifully crafted all the details of that day so Christ could reach out to that one young woman named Alva.

There are two things in the Bible that are spoken of as God’s poem. First, Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world God’s invis­ible qualities…have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” The Greek word for “what has been made” is poiemasin, from which we get the word poem. God’s creation is the poem of God.

Second, there is Ephesians 2:8–10: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” For we are God’s “handi­work.” Another translation says we are God’s “masterpiece,” and this is the same word—poiema.

God not only designed the universe; God designed Alva and named her, and God has plans for her life as carefully fine-tuned as God’s plan for the cosmos. The same is true of each of us.

Vince Vitale is director of the Zacharias Institute at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre closes his play Huis Clos (“No Exit”) with the pronouncement, “Hell is other people.” The play offers a sardonic vision of hell as the place in which one must spend eternity with individuals one would barely seek to spend five minutes with in real life. As one writer notes, “The most terrible, exasperating torment, in Sartre’s eyes, is the agony of soul caused by having to live forever alongside someone who drives you up the wall. Their annoying habits, their pettiness or cynicism or stupidity, their disposition and tastes that so frustratingly conflict with yours and require, if you are to live in communion with them, some sort of accommodation or concession of your own likes and desires—that, says Sartre, is Hell.”(1) Living in a world in which tolerance is the highest value, most readers find Sartre’s vision highly narcissistic or the logical conclusion of an exclusively individualistic, existentialist philosophy.

For many others, however, Sartre’s sentiments are not so easily dismissed. Living, working and interacting with other people can indeed create a hellish existence for many. And most of us, if we are honest, can quickly think of the names of several individuals whose personal habits or grating personalities makes relating to them very difficult at best. Sartre’s honesty, albeit through a cynical lens, also exposes a truth about the realities of human tolerance. On the one hand, we generally base our capacity for tolerance on loving those who are easy to love or who are broadly similar to our own way of living and viewing the world. On the other hand, we are easily tolerant of external causes, ideals, and principles, which are quickly lost when we come into contact with individuals who shatter that ideal image.

I was reminded of Sartre’s insight while serving at my church’s hospitality ministry dinner. Homelessness and hunger for the working poor is a perennial issue where I live. While homelessness remains an abstract idea, it is easy for me to ‘love’ the broad category of people who are poor or homeless. Yet, every month at my church dinner for the homeless—the full-range of humanity on display right in front of me-I often see the ways in which my ‘love’ is merely a form of patronage. Eating with individuals who have not showered in weeks (or months), who suffer from mental illness or chemical dependency tests my love of humanity in ways that the abstract category of homelessness never will. A preference for categories makes it very hard for me to love the real people seated all around me.

A contemporary of Sartre, C.S. Lewis wrote about this tendency to love causes and ideals more than real people in his novel The Screwtape Letters. He saw this hellish tendency as a carefully constructed diabolical strategy. The demon, Wormwood, was advised to “aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious.”(2) The obvious, Lewis notes through his character Screwtape, is the human capacity for both benevolence and malice. Their misdirection and exploitation is not as obvious to us. Diabolical Uncle Screwtape explains to his nephew Wormwood:

“The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary…but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy.”(3)

If benevolence, tolerance, or love are simply attached to remote ideals involving people we never have any direct contact with in the day-to-day, how can that really be benevolence? In the same way, how can we say we love our neighbor when our malice towards particular habits or personality quirks is on full display? How quickly we lose our temper with family members; how easily we show offense at those who do not see it our way; how readily we devise strategies to withhold love, or to punish our ever-present offenders?

Lewis highlights a predominant theme in the teaching of Jesus. Throughout the gospels, Jesus corrects the prevailing notion that the neighbor is one just like me, who agrees with me, and sees the world as I see it. The “neighbor” is other people—not an abstraction, but a living, breathing person with habits, views, and quirks that will not only get on our nerves, but also tempt us toward contempt. And love is only a real virtue when it is lived out among real, human relationships. As Lewis’s character Screwtape notes wryly:

“All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from [Satan’s] house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.”(4)

Sartre was honest in revealing the often hellish reality of living with other people. We would much rather love an ideal, a concept (the homeless, or starving children across the world) than the people right in front of us, in our lives right now. In the life of Jesus, we see a man who loved those individuals directly in front of him; he gathered around him a group of disparate people from tax-collectors on the left, to zealot revolutionaries on the right. He delayed arrival at a temple official’s home because an unknown woman touched the hem of his garment. He delivered a man so out of his mind that he had been driven from his community to live in desolate caves. In front of the most important religious officials of his day, he allowed a woman of questionable reputation to anoint his feet with perfume and use her tears and hair to wash them.

The love of Jesus is not a pie in the sky ideal for people he never knew; it was tangible, messy, and ultimately cost him his life. In Jesus, we see heaven on display in the hell of individual lives. If we seek to follow him, vague ideals about tolerance must give way to flesh and blood reality—loving the all-too-human in front of us.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Lauren Enk, “Hell is Other People; Or is It?” Catholicexchange.com, August 12, 2012, accessed July 10, 2013.
(2) C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Rev. ed., (New York: Collier Books, 1982), 16.
(3) Ibid., The Screwtape Letters, 30.
(4) Ibid., 31.

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A British journalist by the name of Christopher Booker argues that all of literature can be classified into seven basic narratives. Though many would deem the idea itself deficient, Booker exhaustively identifies each category in his book The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. One such category he describes is the “Voyage and Return” plot. Here, Booker catalogs, among other works, Alice and Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Gone with the Wind, each of these stories chronicling a hero who travels away from the familiar and into the unfamiliar, only to return again with new perspective.

Among his list of “Voyage and Return” plots, Booker also identifies Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son. He describes the parable as many of us understand it. The younger son demands his inheritance, travels to another country, squanders his money until he has nothing left, and finally decides to come home again pleading for mercy. When told or heard like this, it is a story that indeed fits neatly into Booker’s category, and perhaps neatly into visions of the spiritual journey. Journeys to faith and to God are often stories of coming and going and returning again.

But is this an accurate understanding of the parable of Jesus? Is the story of the prodigal son really about the son? Is the spiritual journey about our coming and going or God’s?

My story of faith and belief, like many others, cannot be told without some admittance of wandering to and from that faith, in and out of God’s presence, walking with and without Father, Son, or Spirit. When I think of my place among the spiritually vibrant, I am immediately aware of my drifting soul and less than heroic role in the story. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it; prone to leave the God I love, sings the hymnist. I imagine the assembly of the faithful as a grand ballroom of crowned guests with beautiful robes while I find an inconspicuous place in the back of the room. The world of beautiful souls—with its ardent disciples from early centuries and suffering saints from today—does not seem a place in which some of us feel we belong. Some of us feel a bit more like humorist Groucho Marx, who once declined the offer of membership into an organization with the reply: “I don’t care to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.” If I myself am the main character in my story of faith, this is the story I must tell.

Thankfully, I am not.

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