It was just over a week ago that five churches came together at Riverscape Metropark to worship for unity and to supply backpacks for students returning to school throughout the Miami Valley. I wrote in my last blog that I was expecting a miracle, and truthfully I was. I was expecting so many people and so many backpacks that it would be standing room only. I stood around on that muggy Sunday evening and I began to watch the people come in. People from all over the Miami Valley shuffled underneath the pavilion anxiously awaiting our worship to begin. I stood there and watched, and then something crazy happened: people stopped coming.
Photo credit: Kim Swift
I gazed at the streets secretly hoping that a tour bus of people would show up and start unloading hundreds more people. We were somewhere between 300 and 400 in number, which is nothing to sneeze at, but I was expecting a miracle! I was expecting that God would bring hundreds more than what actually showed up.
Honestly, my insides were at war. Worship was getting ready to begin and I wondered: Did we fail? Did God not send the miracle?
I battled back the thought when Steve and I took the platform to welcome everyone to this exciting event. That’s when I saw it, that moment is when I finally started to see the true miracle of the day.
It wasn’t the number of people, although that was pretty amazing.
It wasn’t the number of book bags, although that was incredible.
The miracle was the diversity.
As I stood on that platform and looked out I realized that this must be what heaven looks like. People from all different places, spaces, and cultures coming together to worship a God that is bigger than the self-defining limitations humans put on themselves.
As I closed my eyes in exhaustion that evening, I was reminded that the miracles of God are bigger than anything I could ever dream on my own.
Keep expecting miracles, God-sized miracles – miracles that we can’t even begin to imagine.