“Boy, do you know how to climb?” asked the captain of a ship to a little cabin boy.
“Yes, my captain, in my village I used to climb the tallest trees.”
With agility he began to climb up the ship’s mast. He was already approaching the top when he looked down and vertigo took hold of him.
“I’m getting dizzy, I’m falling” he began to shout out of fear.
The captain, looking at him, said: “Look up, always up!”
The cabin boy obeyed and looked up. Immediately the dizziness passed and he was no longer afraid.
This is what many passages of the Gospel invite us to do: to look up and to trust in God in every event of our lives. Some may say, “I have done that and God has not solved my problem” or “Jesus has not performed a miracle for me as He did many times for others who trusted in Him and asked Him for help.”
The easiest answer to this question is that it is from a lack of trust. I say it is an easy answer because trust cannot be seen, and therefore cannot be measured, so you do not know how much you trust in God. So, it is easy to say “He did not help me because I did not trust in God” or “because I did not have enough faith, God did not perform the miracle for me.” For example, when Jesus said to the paralytic: your sins are forgiven (Mt 9:2), who can see the forgiven sins? Who can know if the sins were forgiven? No one. Jesus physically cured the paralytic in order to show them that He has the power to forgive sins, even though spiritual things cannot be seen or measured.
Going back to the question, I am not kidding when I say that the most difficult answer is also that it is a lack of trust. To trust, as the story of the cabin boy helps us to see, means to look up. We should look up in order to discover His will, rather than asking God to do what I want Him to do. Jesus performed some miracles during his public life, always for a specific purpose. Jesus did not perform all the possible miracles he could have performed.
Instead of being in awe of the miracle, we should look to discover the purpose of the miracle. We should discover His will behind the miracle rather than looking at the miracle as the easiest way to solve the situation. What was better for the paralytic, that his sins were forgiven or that he could walk? Jesus wanted to forgive his sins and the miracle was just a way to show that He had, and still has, the power to forgive sins.
Miracles are for faith and not faith for miracles. If we trust in God because we want Him to perform a miracle, that faith is not really helpful. If God performs a miracle in our life, it is in order to increase our faith and trust in Him.
If we trust in Him, we will discover His loving will and the grace He wants to give us in the specific situations we experience in life, and we will realize that the miracle of removing the problem would not be the solution because then we would not have received the grace He wanted to give us through that situation. Once we are able to look up and discover His will and the graces He wants to grant us, the dizziness will pass and the fear will be gone.
