Maybe I’m a man of little faith. Miracles have never come easy for me. Once, shortly after my conversion, I tried to levitate a yellow Volkswagen Bug. Standing outside the apartment of a college baseball player who had invited our Intervarsity chapter over to watch Seinfeld (a choice of entertainment I’d questioned on moral grounds, but submitted to on the authority of the club president), smoking a cigarette (my conscience still permitted me back then), I turned Jesus’ words about casting mountains into seas over in my mind. As I mulled the possibility of the miraculous, my eyes fell on the yellow Bug, which I estimated weighed one thousand pounds, hunkered in the corner of the parking lot. It wasn’t too big; it wasn’t too small. It was just the right size to be miraculously levitated.
I reviewed Jesus’ words, which seemed to say that if I had sufficient faith, I should be able to lift the Bug. I took an index of whether I truly believed this, which I understood to be the crux of the matter. If I lacked the requisite belief, the exercise would fail and shouldn’t be tried in the first place. Yet, it seemed that I did believe and not doubt that I could levitate the Volkswagen, through faith.
But a question came to mind, assuming I could levitate the Bug, should I levitate it? Even though I’d only been a true believer for a matter of months, I knew that God didn’t appreciate having His power used to play parlor tricks. So I took stock of my motives, testing them to see whether they were pure or false. Maybe I performed this inventory too quickly, but still, eleven years later, it seems that I had good reason for wanting to perform a miracle. I wanted to establish the radical validity of the words of Christ. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone; no one was around to impress; they were all inside watching Seinfeld.
And so I made my decision. I would try, by faith, to levitate the Bug. I closed my eyes and communed with God in my heart. I thought of extending my hand toward the Bug as a faith-channeling rod, but this reminded me too much of the scene from The Empire Strikes Back when Luke tries (and fails) to use the Force to get his X-Wing Fighter out of the Dagoba swamp, and it seemed important not to mix up the make-believe Force with my actually-believed Faith, so I kept my arms at my sides. Then, in the blackness of my mind’s eye, I exerted my faith upon the Bug, willing it to rise off the ground like a hot air balloon.
I opened my eyes. And there it was. Sitting exactly where I left it, its radial tires fixed firm to the asphalt by gravity. I beheld the Bug’s inert mass. I frowned and shrugged. Then I flicked the burning butt of my cigarette into the street and went inside to catch Friends, which came on after Seinfeld.
Later that same year, I went to a winter retreat at Lake Tahoe. Our speaker was a Charismatic pastor, who told stories of Christians who were able, by faith, to do things like rebuke disease and pronounce health. One story culminated in an entire wing of a hospital being vacated by a faith healer. The pastor, a young man with chiseled features, declared that we too, the members of Intervarsity, could also wield that kind of power, if only we had the desire and the faith. Later, I cornered him and told him that I wanted to be someone who performed these kinds of signs and wonders. The pastor, with only the slightest note of uncertainty in his voice, said to me, “then you will.”
On the last day of the retreat, I was to be baptized in Lake Tahoe. It was speculated that the water would be so cold that it would numb upon touch. About an hour before the baptism, I sat in the communal cabin, gazing out a window. Snow was on the beach and gray clouds blotted the light from the sky. I thought how nice it would be if the sun made an appearance to thaw the frosty beach.
As we’d been hearing talks from the Charismatic pastor about how nothing was impossible for God, I thought to ask Him for a small, if unimportant, favor. I wanted sunshine. I closed my eyes and prayed for it, and when I opened them, it was almost unbelievable: the sun had come out. Its rays fell generously and gloriously nowhere in all the Sierra Nevada Mountains except on the exact patch of shore where we were to be baptized.
Marveling at this, I thanked God and immediately went to alert my friends to the small but sensory-perceptible miracle. But just as I was about to do so, a note of caution sounded, ever so subtly, in my soul. I refrained from telling the others, but instead sat and watched the sunshine for five minutes to see if it would hold. It did. I decided to really trust the miracle’s falsifiablility and went away for half-an-hour. I had coffee and a cookie (somehow I’d quit smoking by then). I decided that if the miracle were still there when I returned, then I would tell everyone. But when I returned to the window, the sun was gone, which was disappointing, of course.
I got baptized anyway. The pastor had volunteered to perform the sacrament. Four of us were to get dunked in the lake. Before hand, there was much preoccupation with the coldness of the water. The preoccupation was entirely justified. The water was excruciatingly cold, so cold it made my legs feel like flaming cement. The pastor went out into the lake first, and one by one each of us trudged through the gray water toward him, so he could fully immerse us in the freezing baptismal, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Each of us probably took a few minutes to get in and out, and so for ten minutes the pastor withstood the icy water, which I think took a lot of faith in the intrinsic value of the whole ritual. When the last of us had been baptized, it was almost funny, only not, because the pastor splashed out of the lake as fast as he could and sprinted up the beach, up the stairs, and disappeared into the cabin to tend to his lower extremities. To this day I hope he didn’t hurt himself.
And to this day, when I think about my baptism, I think more about my quasi-miracle than I do about my identification with Jesus’ death and resurrection, God’s foreknowledge of my salvation, my predestination to be conformed to Christ’s Likeness, my calling into His Kingdom, my justification, my glorification.
Maybe that’s why God doesn’t answer my prayers for signs and wonders. I’d make Him into a genie and forget that He’s a God. Or maybe I’m making excuses for His apparent failure to keep His promises about what one could do with faith like a child. But the truth is I still think that when I prayed for sunshine, He answered. It was an enigmatic iteration, admittedly. But I’ve come to think of enigma as His calling card. He’s subtle, I think. And probably I’m simply a man of little faith. Moses probably could have levitated the Volkswagen, and Elijah probably could have opened up the clouds and brought down the sun. I’ll grant without reservation that I’m a man of little faith. But at least I have a little, and it’s real.
