Miracles by Eric Metaxes

Tim got me Miracles by Eric Metaxas for Christmas last year. Since I always have a library book waiting on my bedside table, it took me a while to get to this one. I wish I wouldn’t have waited. It is a delightful and uplifting book. It left me in awe of our Awesome God with every story.

He begins the book with a discussion of belief and faith and miracles. He believes that we implicitly know there is more out there. Yet our rational minds fight this feeling, trying to convince us the material world is all there is. But, he wonders, if there truly is more? 

In a beautiful paragraph, he asks, “What is it in us that rebels against this lie of life without meaning – and not only a lie but a monstrous lie that stands against everything we somehow know to be true and good and beautiful? Why do we sometimes feel that we are exiles from someplace glorious? What is this innate feeling that we have shared across cultures, centuries, and continents? We can spend our lives denying it, but our very bones and atoms cry out that this denial of meaning is a lie, that everything in us not only longs for that other world and for meaning, but also needs that other world and needs meaning more than food or water or air. it is what we were made for and we will not rest until we find it again.”

If we are willing to acknowledge there is more, there is something or someone else out there, that we long for what is beyond our understanding, then perhaps we can bring ourselves to believe that sometimes eternity touches earth and we experience the beyond. 

In the second half of the book, he tells the miracle stories. He categorizes them into tales of conversion, healing, inner healing, angelic encounters, and heavenly visions. He even includes a “variety of miracles” chapter to catalog the ones that don’t neatly fit into his categories. 

The stories are told by people he personally knows so as to negate and credibility factor. The sheer number of amazing encounters makes me wonder if miracles are more common than I thought. Perhaps many people are experiencing God, and we just don’t know about it. 

This book is a breeze of fresh air, and reading it was a sheer delight.