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About praying to find lost keys: To those unfamiliar with the skeptical accusation, it goes something like “Why is it that a loving Heaven helps Peter Priesthood in Orem find his lost car keys, but doesn’t protect the hungry and abused?” While I never mentioned this at the NOM forum, it was always plain to me as I read those discussions that 1) A loving heaven helps Peter Priesthood in Orem and all the extreme corners of the earth find the silly little things that matter a lot to their hearts, and 2) a loving heaven forces nobody to live out of harms way, to be born out of harms way, to love life more than wealth, or to behave well.
The skeptical argument arises out of real pain, but seen objectively, it is hollow, in my opinion. In technical terms, theodicy (“the problem of evil”) is primarily an emotional problem, not a philosophical one.
Tom Haws wrote:About praying to find lost keys:
To those unfamiliar with the skeptical accusation, it goes something like “Why is it that a loving Heaven helps Peter Priesthood in Orem find his lost car keys, but doesn’t protect the hungry and abused?” While I never mentioned this at the NOM forum, it was always plain to me as I read those discussions that 1) A loving heaven helps Peter Priesthood in Orem and all the extreme corners of the earth find the silly little things that matter a lot to their hearts, and 2) a loving heaven forces nobody to live out of harms way, to be born out of harms way, to love life more than wealth, or to behave well.
Tom,I like points 1 and 2 above.
I also think it has something to do with experience. Peter Priesthood experiences what are silly little things to you and me, but may be daily important faith-promoting experiences for him, whereas he may not really experience “hungry or abused” which may just be out of his realm of experience, so a loving Father can still provide small and simple miracles without having to first conquer the major ones.
I had an experience a couple weeks ago. My two sons (11 and 6) went with me to get in my truck and head to church. The truck is old, and in the cold doesn’t start well. It wouldn’t start. I tried and tried until I was worried I flooded the engine. So I popped the hood and told the boys I better check it out.
My 11 yr old said, “Dad, why don’t we say a prayer?” It melted my heart, and my first reaction was to say, “That really won’t help…the problem is the idle switch gets stuck in the cold…”
😳 but I stopped myself and thought, I will not deprive my child of having a belief in something like that. I don’t know if it will work, but I won’t teach him not to follow his beliefs. So he said a quick and darling prayer to help the truck start.I hopped out and opened the hood…not sure really what I was looking at because I’m not a mechanic, but I fiddled with some things and tugged at a few tubes and things, and shut the hood and returned to the driver’s seat.
On first try, the truck started right up.
I looked at my boy and said, “Well, I guess your prayer worked!”
He said, “well, to be honest, it wasn’t just me, when you got out of the truck, [my little brother (he used his name of course)] in the back seat also said another prayer. So I think it was both of us praying that helped.”
Then the little guy in the back seat piped up:
“Yep. See Dad? 2 prayers beat one truck! Its true!”
This was a miracle to me. The significance of these 2 young boys learning that they can have hope in prayers will last in our family for years. I think it will influence their faith as they grow. There could be any zillion of explanations or just luck for how it happened, but I cannot argue the facts…
1. The truck wouldn’t start
2. The boys prayed
3. The truck started.
Should I try to explain to my boys that it is most likely just coincidence so they don’t learn unrealistic expectations in the future? I don’t think so. I choose to believe it was a miracle, and I choose to believe my boys will grow in faith, and are great examples to me of great faith (makes me think of “a little child shall lead them”).
Certainly the almighty God of the Universe has more important things to do than help our truck start…but sometimes these small and simple little things that happen bring meaningful and lasting experiences to our lives. Personal experiences, great or small, are what this life is about. And that is not unimportant to the Lord Almighty, in my opinion.
I’m not trying to be a downer here, since these stories obviously mean different things to different people, but I have had a similar experience; just as strange but with very little religious significance. Yesterday, my co-worker told me he was going to go to our cafeteria to get some coffee so he could wake up. About 1 minute after he came back with 2 cups of coffee, a Red Bull car pulled into our property and started handing out a bunch of cans Red Bulls. I sincerely wonder how different this is from the other stories. spacious maze wrote:I sincerely wonder how different this is from the other stories.
I think it’s good to wonder. Especially sincerely. That’s what I love about this group.
Hey, here’s a mind blower for you: Tom the New-Ager (a new label!) says maybe there is more going on than meets the eye. Maybe your co-worker called the Red Bull truck to him. Just warping your mind here.
spacious maze wrote:I sincerely wonder how different this is from the other stories.
In reality, I’m not sure there is a difference at all between the stories.There is personal meaning to some experiences that makes the difference, IMO. Like you said, different meaning to different people.
Personally, I think most of the “little miracles” of life – and I would include anything explicable, like lost car keys being found, someone being healed from a blessing, a prayer coming to fruition – are a mix of two things: 1 – faith precedes the miracle, meaning that our positive feelings about the outcome influence the outcome (this is especially true for being healed – there is a strong correlation between people knowing they are being prayed for and being healed, but not a strong correlation for people NOT knowing they are being prayed for and beind healed). Maybe this is placebo effect or endorphins or confirming evidence of what we already believe, but mind over matter does sometimes work.
2 – luck, alignment with the universe, awareness of the collective unconscious or intuition. What it seems like to me is something along the lines of felixis felicitus serum from Harry Potter: you have mental clarity and focus of what the outcome will be. You see your direction more clearly and your actions line up with what will happen.
That’s perfect, hawk. I totally, totally agree!!! That means alot!! 
spacious maze wrote:I sincerely wonder how different this is from the other stories.
I think Spacious Maze brings up a good point…what is the difference between coincidental situations and miracles, and I agree with Hawkgrrrl that it is likely a component of multiple factors, including luck and self-fulfilling prophecies as one becomes focused on the situation at hand.
There is a BYU professor speech I pulled off of FAIR that makes a good point on this subject, and warns us about sentimentalism vs. true spiritual experiences, which I think Spacious maze is raising that same flag of warning. Professor Reynolds says:
Quote:“We are observing a widespread difficulty in distinguishing between sentimentalism and true spiritual experience. Too much of the literature used, seen, and quoted in the Church today is just sentimental trash which is designed to pull our heartstrings or moisten our eyes, but it is not born of true spiritual experience. The tendency of our youth to use sentimental stories in Church talks creates a culture of spiritual misunderstanding in which thinking and learning are discouraged.
…
It may be that some sentimentality is a good and necessary thing, and certainly there is a place for it in our relationship with our loved ones. But it should never be leaned upon as a substitute for spirituality. Reliance on sentimentality will stunt our own spiritual growth by misleading us and filling our understanding with false experiences.”
(Noel B. Reynolds, 30 June 1981, “Reason and Revelation”)
I think this is similar to warnings Joseph Smith gave early church members about seeking sensational spiritual manifestations, vs the pure revelations of the still small voice. Sometimes we need to be reminded to be humble, honest and have integrity with our search for spiritual manifestations.
While I cannot judge what miracles or spiritual experiences any of you go through…I can make sure that I don’t fall into a trap of seeking sensational stories or “feel good” emotions that don’t provide substance to my spiritual growth. I need to continue to discern between these in my life, and always be seeking a closer and stronger relationship with my God.
I actually feel that the talk of Brother Reynolds is built a bit uncomfortably, for me at least, on a type of religion thinking that is now foreign to me. I think there may very well be a warning to be made in the area he observes, but I’m not sure that the warning he is making is the proper one. In fact, it may be he is plain wrong in discounting the value of the myths the young people are passing around. Joseph Campbell said myth is another person’s religion, and it sounds to me like Brother Reynolds is saying, “Mine is true religion; yours is myth.” If that is indeed what he is saying, it’s perfectly understandable and normal for the stage he may be speaking from, but it’s a whole lot more enjoyable to be able to relax and appreciate the poetry the young people are appreciating. The only warning I would make (and not at all in the tone of warning) would be like in the temple, “These beautiful stories our youth are sharing are, of course, entirely figurative (as are many of our scriptural stories).”
Didn’t Christ use miracles to help people build faith in Him and his mission? Like just before He healed a sick person or raised someone from the dead, he would say, “Thy sins are forgiven thee”, and the people would be upset that he placed himself as God who forgave sins. Then Jesus would say, “So, you will know that I am who I say I am, “Which is harder to do, raise the dead or forgive a sin.” Or something to that effect. I think Christ used various means to build faith. this is a strange question to me because i have such a hard time believing in the super natural. on my mission we gave many blessings, some that came true and some that didn’t. some people would attribute to the miraculous and most, to me at least, seemed like it could have happened without the blessing. there is only one experience in my life that seems to be an exception to that and it has completely puzzelled me. i can’t explain it any other way than a miracle and that is very hard for someone like me to do. i was on my mission and we were sitting down to eat with a family from our ward we’ll call them the williams. they had just recently taken in a lady that had an drug and alcohol problem. we were downstairs and the lady with the problems, we’ll call her laura, was upstairs. we had just set the table and bowed our heads to pray when in the middle of our prayer we heard a very loud thud. we all immidiatly got up. i thought at first that it was their baby granddaughter who they had been taking care of the last couple of days. it was actually this lady laura. she had fallen down a very steep stairwell and at the end of the stairwell there was very little space that took you into the living room and then a solid wall. she had fallen head first into the wall and was laying twitching in a very awkward position with her head and neck bent into the wall. sister williams dragged her body a couple of feet out of the stairwell into the living room. she was bleeding from her nose, mouth, and ears and was also bubbling and foaming at the mouth and still twiching. she then stopped twiching and i was sure she was dead. she stopped breathing and i couldn’t find a pulse. my companion got out his oil and suggested giving a blessing. personally in my mind i didn’t see the point. i had no faith that she was going to live let alone if she was even still alive. i anointed her and then my companion gave the blessing. i was just thinking in my head “don’t say anything dumb, you aren’t gonna heal her, she’s dead” he blessed her that she would have a complete recovery and be fine. i opened my eyes and looked at my companion like what are you thinking?! about a minute after the blessing the ambulance came and rushed her to the hospitol. we went home after comforting the williams. i was convinced that my companion was nuts. the next day we got a call from the williams that laura was fine and had been released from the hospitol. i couldn’t believe what i heard. we went over to see her. she was in a lot of pain but was completely fine other than some bumps and bruises. she told us that she had taken a bad combination of drugs and alcohol and had lost conscienceness and fell down the stairs.
i still can’t understand how that happened to this day. in my mind she was dead. that is really the only experience that has no other explanation than being a miracle that i’ve witnessed. my companion must have had a lot of faith to make up for my lack of it. i guess most people don’t share these kinds of stories and i haven’t shared it with a lot of people mainly because it hasn’t come up a lot. i guess the validity of this story is up to whoever reads it.
this is definently a strange experience when compared to another that happened just a few months later in the same area. we got a call from a family in our ward asking us to go to the hospitol to give their father a blessing. we got there and he was is in critical condition. his head had been run over by a truck when he was working on it. we had to sit in the waiting area for quite a while before they would allow us to go in. that was the weirdest part because there was another man waiting next to us and as we started talking we found that he was a member of the community of christ and was waiting to give a blessing to his relative. we started talking and we basically believed the same thing as each other the only difference between our religions was the leadership after joseph smith. he had just as much if not more faith as we did. he was very sympathetic to our church and had nothing against us. after talking for a little bit we got called in to give the man a blessing. given my previous experience i figured that i just needed to approach this situation with more faith. we got into his room and he was in bad shape. his head had swollen to three times its normal size. we had to give the blessing on his feet because we weren’t allowed to touch his head. his family members actually had full faith that we’d be able to heal him. so did i until i got into the room and saw the severity of the situation. both me and my companion got sick to our stomachs as we administered the blessing. we couldn’t pronounce a blessing of healing because we both knew it wouldn’t happen. 15 minutes later he was dead. the lady who the community of christ member went and saw we found out was going to be fine after he had given the blessing. before entering the hospitol i felt like a man on mission to save this individual with my extrodinary faith. afterwards i was definently uncertain about that power. the priesthood’s power to physically save has definently been a difficult subject for me to understand. i certainly hope that its true but most often i am given experiences that produce doubt.
honestly, looking back, the first experience didn’t really build my faith. i had many more spiritual experiences in the same area that built my testimony a whole lot more. it was abnormal definently, but i think that spiritually i have felt closer to god or more enlightened in lessons that we taught or during personal scripture study or being in the sincere service of others. i remember a story of where james e talmage’s son was given a blessing by a fellow apostle that he’d be healed from blindness i think and it never happened and he struggled with that most of his life. it’s definently a tough question i dont have the answer to but from a religious standpoint i don’t think that should be our biggest concern. i don’t think that religion should be about raising the dead, parting the red sea, or talking donkeys. it should be about the miracles of bringing light to the spiritual blindness that plagues all of us, being born again, and healing the broken hearted. those things are real in my mind and i have no problem accepting them. those things can be explained in my heart.
jbelli21 wrote:from a religious standpoint i don’t think that should be our biggest concern. i don’t think that religion should be about raising the dead, parting the red sea, or talking donkeys. it should be about the miracles of bringing light to the spiritual blindness that plagues all of us, being born again, and healing the broken hearted. those things are real in my mind and i have no problem accepting them. those things can be explained in my heart.
I like the way this is worded, jbelli21. I think that is the role of religion in life…for our spiritual guidance. Not to say miracles of the physical world can’t happen (I believe the can when it leads to a spiritual experience), but that is not the first and foremost role of religion to me either, and I would not test religion on such things.I am a huge believer in miracles, large and small, and have been a witness to many. I will share a recent one with you all… A year ago a very close friend went to a hospital with severe chest pains. He was referred to a specialist who after a full day of running numerous tests (Including some state of the art fancy machine that took a good look inside his heart) had determined that our friend needed emergency surgery in order to save his life. It was scheduled for the following morning. That evening he asked us to come visit and for my husband to give him a blessing. In that blessing my husband told him that he still had a lot he would accomplish in this life and his heart would no longer be a hindrance. The next morning when he went in for surgery, to the doctors surprise they found a perfect healthy heart inside. It has given him no problems since.
If you really want to learn about modern day miracles than you need to study the life of a man named Iohani Wolfgramm. (1911-1997) An amazing man with such great faith that he has performed many miracles including several cases of raising the dead. -no kidding!
I first heard about this man from a friend who use to live next door to him when he was a boy. He would hang out with him in his garage and listen to his incredible stories of his life. His accounts peaked my curiosity. I found this article about him raising his daughter from the dead in the June 2001 Ensign in an article by Dallin H Oaks titled Miracles.
I then discovered that his daughter had written a book about his life. (The same daughter who had been raised from the dead as a child) I was able to get in touch with this beautiful lady (Tisina Wolfgramm Gerber) and she invited my husband and I to her home. She was very poor and her her home very humble, but I have never felt such great love and hospitality from anyone in my life as I did that evening. We spent three hours with her as she shared stories of her family. It was an incredible evening.
Here is a link to a copy of this book that is stored online in Family History Archives.
Chapter 8 is titled: Healings, Visions, Prophecies. You will be blown away by the faith of this man!
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/FH27&CISOPTR=31717
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