When I was little we lived in an old farmhouse with a tall staircase just inside the front door. I used to love jumping from the stairs onto the wooden floor below. I loved the sound that the floor made when I landed and I loved the free-falling sensation that accompanied my triumphant leaps. I would start at the bottom step and jump from one step higher each time until I finally jumped from the very top. I remember being about 5 and having a very intense conversation with my dad about how it wasn’t possible for me to jump from the top because it was too high and it was dangerous. He, very reasonably, pointed out that I was quite small and if I jumped from the top I wouldn’t make it to the bottom but would instead land on the stairs and hurt myself. I remember sitting there and nodding my sweet, curly head in obedience but I also remember it was the first time I ever disagreed with my dad. You see I knew, absolutely knew, that I jumped from the top step and landed on the floor. As I got older and learned new things I found that I could no longer jump all the way from the top to the bottom. I had learned about things like gravity and my knowledge pinned me to the earth. Somehow I lost my certainty in the floating; I lost faith that my beloved stairs would vanish from beneath me as I descended, depositing me safely, giggling on the warm, wooden floor.

The other morning I was driving to work and as I merged onto the highway there was a small dark car in front of me, a white truck beside me and no one behind me. I wanted to pass the car in front of me so I checked my rear view and then looked to see where the white truck was. In a mere matter of seconds that truck, nondescript and average in every way, had disappeared. It wasn’t next to me, wasn’t behind me, wasn’t before me…it was just gone. My first thought was to check my mirrors and see if it had gone off the road or become disabled. I slowed down so that I could take a good look and found no evidence of the truck. It was weird to say the least. Usually there are a few people on the highway that I wish would vanish but this was a real puzzle. My second thought was almost laughable to me “what if that truck was translated like Enoch or Philip” but that thought gripped me intensely. Why would it be laughable to me or seem silly and a bit mad to think that someone had been translated off the highway? Why, when there was no evidence to the contrary, did I have such difficulty viewing the miraculous as a viable answer to the mystery of the missing truck? I began to think about how people, in general, love to find the answer. We love to make all the pieces fit and have answers for how everything comes together. When you think about the sheer number of crime procedurals that populate our television schedules it seems pretty obvious that we’re wired to hunt for answers. We are like dads who want to make sure that our daughters aren’t doing anything that would harm them, so we educate them about the dangerous realities of their play. We work so hard to de-mystify our world that we have forgotten that we’re encouraged to have child-like faith.

In Luke 18:17 Jesus tells us that if we don’t receive the kingdom of God like a little child we won’t enter it. I am not a theologian by any means, but I have always thought that this verse was about perspective as much as anything else. You see, if I can’t see the miraculous all around me then I am not able to participate in it. If my eyes have been so clouded by facts and figures that I have lost the ability to see the kingdom then, of course, I won’t be able to enter it. Unless I believe that there is a magical kingdom through the wardrobe I’ll only ever find a place to hang my coats; but in order to believe in magical wardrobes or translated trucks I have to look beyond reason to something deeper and higher. I’m not saying that reason should be laid aside or facts should be forgotten, they are valuable and have important purpose and place. I am saying that reason and fact shouldn’t hold the highest place. I’m saying, maybe we should stop searching so intently for the facts surrounding the vanishing vehicles in our lives (believe me over the next few days I searched that road for skid marks, broken branches, tire ruts in the median, anything that would provide a logical explanation and found nothing). Perhaps we should be a little more child-like in our recognition that when the Word tells us that nothing is impossible with God (Luke 1:37) it means nothing. For my part I believe that I really did jump the entire length of that staircase because I didn’t know that I couldn’t. The facts didn’t measure up to the truth that I had jumped from the top, safely, many times. I also choose to believe that a random white truck was translated from one place to another on an inconsequential stretch of Pennsylvania highway a few days ago and I pray that whatever God sent the driver of that truck to do was successful because it was business for a Kingdom that has to be believed to be seen. I believe that if nothing is impossible than there is a whole lot of miraculous possibility that I have not been embracing. I believe!