Missing Miracles

I first went to church with my mother and father in the 1950s. I didn't like it much; I didn't understand anything they were saying. My mother was faithful to church; she'd been saved in a William Branham crusade. I learned to stay home with my sister who'd read to me the Sunday funnies.

Through junior high and high school I went to church and the Methodist Youth Fellowship to have some social life. I pretty much stopped when I went to live in San Francisco in 1967. I wasn't a hippie, I was just looking for a job. I got exposed there to Eastern philosophies and religions (rock and role didn't help), and after the Navy meditation. Something was there, somehow both imagined and real.

I found out it was the Devil. I segued into the Kingdom of God. At the House of Praise in Kaimuki, Hawaii, there were miracles. We spoke in tongues. God moved through us. After he SPOKE to me, I went to seminary (Melodyland School of Theology) to find out what he has spoken to other men. I never entertained the thought of pastoring. Melodyland was a school of prophets. There were miracles all over the place. Praying for healing was routine. I became complacent; very poor, I slacked off on attendance. Got married and didn't push involvement with the church on my wife, even at Christian Chapel of Walnut, which was actively, extensively Charismatic.

So now at 77 and ready to die (not any time soon), I want to get back to activity in the church. Where's the miracles? Not at the local spiritually-dead churches. Even at the Charismatic, people praise and worship God thrusting out their hands, but no prayer. Broken-hearted in, broken-hearted out. No wonder the churches are half or less full after many years; the revival isn't going to come in, until the church goes out!

Miracles, those irrefutable, convincing demonstrations of the invisible God's presence and power (and of His will--what He is doing), are missing. My pretty Bible will not convince anybody, but an experienced miracle is like being whupped up alongside the head with a two-by-four. "Yup, THAT happened!"

Go for the welt.