We had a good and surprising thing happen today—I won’t go into what, because it’s my wife’s story to tell or not to tell, as she chooses—and it got me thinking. It wasn’t the sort of thing that’s completely impossible unless God does a miracle, and so you pray for a miracle, and sometimes God says yes; rather, it was the sort of thing that’s completely improbable, and so you never pray for it because it never crosses your mind that it could happen. It was the sort of possibility that’s so far off the normal course of how things happen that my wife had never even thought to hope for it, or to ask for it . . . and yet, in God’s good time, it did, completely out of left field. She never saw it coming (nor did I).God does this sometimes; he doesn’t just do the impossible, he also does the wildly improbable—the sort of thing which is objectively easier than healing the sick and raising the dead, but just as unheard-of in our experience. I think in some ways that impresses us even more, despite the fact that it’s objectively easier; granted, it might not show off as much of the power of God, but instead it reveals a great deal about the imagination of God, that he can think of and bring about good things which would never cross our minds. God isn’t simply a being who has a lot more power than us, nor even just a being who has a lot more power and knows a lot more; he’s also infinitely wiser, more creative, better at thinking sideways and around corners. He conceives of possibilities that we would never conceive of even if we had the power to make them happen; and then he brings them about, out of the blue, just to remind us that he’s God and we’re not. (Well, not just to remind us, since he uses them to accomplish all sorts of other things, too. But still.)
