Some time ago, a man named John Wisdom came up with something that he calls a parable. In his parable, Wisdom claims that two people return to a long neglected garden, and find that some of their plants are thriving. One of these men asserts that there a gardener must have been tending the garden; the other man suggests that it just happened. So, the two of them pitch tents and camp out, and observe for a few weeks. During that time, they observe no gardener. The first man suggests that the gardener is invisible. So, they bring in bloodhounds, but after several more weeks, there is still no sign of a gardener. The first man revises his opinion of the gardener and says that he is not only invisible, but has so scent and gives no sound. The second man then asks how an invisible, intangible, and elusive gardener is any different from no gardener at all?

I suppose that is how a lot of people perceive God. He cannot be seen, touched, smelled (at least, by most of us), and yet, His works are manifest. It doesn’t help any that many of His works have been imitated by others. Even some people that believe in God don’t believe that, in this day and age, He actually interacts with humankind any more. These people believe that God has set things in motion and then sat back to watch what will happen. If you stop and think about it, though, He would have already known what would happen, as soon as He started the process, so such an experiment would be mind-numbingly boring.

I mentioned earlier that some of God’s works have been imitated. I don’t think there are many “faith-healers” these days, but there have been some in recent history that made an awful lot of money with precious few (if any) people actually getting healed. In a way, I am grateful to Steve Martin for doing the movie, “Leap of Faith.” In that movie, Steve Martin plays Jonas Nightingale, who tours the country answering questions that people haven’t asked him, “healing” people, preaching fiery sermons, and collecting bucketfuls of money. I think that the movie made plain just how easy it is to convince people that they have seen something miraculous, when they really haven’t. It should make one skeptical of faith-healers, mind-readers, and ghost-whisperers. There’s a lot of flim-flam out there.

But, there is also a real God, who does heal people. I have been present when people that I actually knew got healed. We had a man in our church that had a degenerative disease that attacked his muscles. It was incredible, really, to see this man, 6’4” and strong as an ox, slowly dissolve into a mere shadow of what he had been. On good days, he could walk with crutches, but a lot of days he stayed in a wheelchair. We had an altar call at church one night, and he left his crutches at his chair and walked up to the altar. After service, he challenged his son to a one-on-one basketball game, and he played very well. We had another man that was on the list for a heart transplant. At Sunday service we prayed for him, because Monday morning he was to have an in-depth medical exam to determine his priority on the list. Monday morning they took him off the list entirely, and told him that there was nothing wrong with his heart. These experiences are a little different from going to see a faith-healer and seeing somebody you don’t know, and have never seen before, roll up in a wheelchair, and have the faith-healer pray over them, and touch them, and then see that person get out of the wheelchair.

It is true that there are times when all the prayer in the world doesn’t result in a healing. I suppose that if God healed every person who ever got sick that got prayed for by a faithful Christian, we would probably have a bigger problem with overpopulation than we have now. Ruth Bell Graham (the late wife of Rev. Billy Graham) once said that if God answered every prayer, she’d have married the wrong man three times. I don’t think that she really meant to say that God doesn’t answer every prayer, only that sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the answer isn’t the answer we expected, and so we don’t recognize it as being an answer at all. There is an old story about a faithful Christian man whose house was in an area that flooded. He prayed about it, and received assurance from God that he would be saved. After a little while, a boat came by, and offered to take him out of the flooded area, but he called out the first-floor window that God was going to save him, so they should try to find someone else that needed saving to put in their boat. Soon, though, the flood waters rose enough that he had to move up to the second floor. Another boat came by, and a similar conversation ensued. The flood waters continued to rise, and he moved up to the roof. The rain eased enough that a helicopter was able to fly by, and they offered to lower a rope, so that he could be pulled on board, and they would fly him out of the flood zone. Once again, he assured then that God was going to save him, and they should look for others less fortunate. The flood waters continued to rise, though, and he soon found himself treading water. Eventually, his legs tired, and he drowned. When he arrived in Heaven, he sought out God, and demanded to know, “What happened? I thought you were going to save me?” to which God replied, “I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more did you want?”