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I have often thought about this question. It seems people have miraculous car key recovery stories in droves. Miraculous health recovery stories in smaller quantities. Miracles that defy the laws of physics in astounding ways are not very common. Here is my assessment as to why there are so many car key recovery miracles.
1. In most advanced societies, there are millions and millions of car keys out there.
2. They are a small, heavily used item which makes them susceptible to loss.
3. They are often misplaced in somewhat obvious and personal places. For example, I lost mine a while ago and found them under some clutter on the edge of my desk a few weeks later.
4. They are particularly susceptible to recovery if you look really hard.
5. They are very important to people, leaving them stranded if lost. This leads to fervent prayer.
I don’t want to be a naysayer about miracles, but the car key recovery story has me wondering if there is a reasonable explanation, and this is my attempt at it. I think the same is also true with wallets.
Do you believe in miracles, and are many miracles simply the result of fortuitous circumstances?
I do not believe in an interventionist God. However, most LDS doctrine/culture seems to point to God controlling and affecting even mundane events (like car keys). I believe that belief in an interventionist God tends to give people a sense of control over things that they otherwise would not have control over. I also believe that belief in these sort of small interventions gives people a sense of connection and importance, that God himself knows them and takes time out of his busy schedule running the universe to tip the scales of destiny or randomness in their favor.
I believe that the term “tender mercies” has recently come to be synonymous with these sort of mundane “car key” events that collectively can give people hope, confidence, and a feeling of connectedness.
According to Elder David Bednar (who pretty much coined to term) tender mercies “are the very personal and individualized blessings, strength, protection, assurances, guidance, loving-kindnesses, consolation, support, and spiritual gifts which we receive from and because of and through the Lord Jesus Christ,”
I do not believe in (legitimate defy the laws of physics) miracles. I do withhold judgement on whether or not they could exist somewhere for some people. They could be like black swan events. However, for my life personally miracles are so rare as to be nonexistent and I operate on probabilities.
6. You stick with looking for car keys until you find them. And by that I mean you don’t just pray and give up the search. You pray and get back to looking. Or maybe prayer is a needed break from looking that serves as a pause to let you organize thought.
And we have that narrative surrounding prayer for issues that are not related to lost keys. What’s the line? We pray like everything depends on god and work like everything depends on you. When we’re done with the lost keys prayer we resume the search and we stick with the search until it’s over. Stands to reason to treat non-key related prayers similarly.
nibbler wrote:
6. You stick with looking for car keys until you find them.IDK man. I only find my keys after I quit looking for them. Or I don’t.
One time was after weeks of looking, spread across 2 counties. A month later, I found them in a drawer in the garage where (I presume) my 4yo had deposited them after our family outing.
The other time was when I had left my work keys in the van door pouch and my wife stole the van during a psychosis. 400 miles away she gave it to a drifter who later totaled it in a hit and run. It was eventually impounded so I knew where they were then (probably) but I didn’t have the impound fees. It turns out I didn’t need my work keys any more because no transportation to work.
Quote:Do you believe in miracles, and are many miracles simply the result of fortuitous circumstances?
I take a Deist approach to God and believe Gad has little if any interaction with humans. I do believe miracles exist and are possible however rare they are. I would not consider finding lost car keys a “miracle” (I believe miracles are more grand) and I’m not sure I’d even consider most F&TM car key stories to be tender mercies. My Deist God set things in order and let it and us go – mostly whatever happens just happens. We find our keys or we don’t, God doesn’t care either way.
I guess for me, I lean mostly to the hands-off deist approach with a cosmic twist. Assuming there is a God who wants to intervene at different times and that the fate of the world may in fact rest on a set of car keys – God may decide to send out a memo to that fact announcing where the keys are and thus alter the fate of the world. We tell tons of stories similar to this. However, car keys are very personal and very universal – hence their appeal. The paradox of the number of times where the fate of the world appears to matter vs the times when it seems to rest in such a small action is a source of interest to me.
I personally don’t think God intervenes that much BUT collectively we need to think that we matter enough to cause God to intervene, hence we look for those “tender mercies” as validation of our importance in the scope of the things (conversely, I feel this is why science gets such a hard rap regularly – because the scope of the universe itself gives credence that we are small and don’t really matter in the course of things) . On the other hand, it sure would be nice to have someone with that magnitude of power (or perceived power) in my corner and intervening in small ways like that at key points in my life.
Okay, so here’s my own personal version of the lost car keys story. I was about five years old at the time this all happened. I was at home alone with my mother on one of those days when there was “nothing to do.” Picking up what we called simply “the bell,” I began to try to entertain myself. The bell was one of those little portable timers that you could set for anywhere up to an hour by turning the dial on the front to a number between 1 and 60. As the minutes passed, you could hear the tick, tick, tick as the little arrow on the dial moved slowly counterclockwise back towards the top of the timer. When it reached the number zero, a crystal clear “ding!” would sound. Mother used it every day when when she was cooking. The bell was a lot of fun to play with particularly for a child who hadn’t ever even seen a TV, much less played a video game! Holding the bell in one hand, I would turn the dial just past the 5-minute marker with the other hand, and then immediately back to the 0-minutes marker at the top. “Ding!” I loved the sound it made. Over and over again I repeated the action: Wind to the right, wind to the left. Ding! Wind to the right, wind to the left. Ding!
“Kathryn, the bell is not a toy and it’s not made to be played with like that. You need to stop before you break it,” my mother warned.
“I’m not going to break it,” I answered knowingly. “Watch!” Wind to the right, wind to the left. Ding! Wind to the right, wind to the left. Ding! Every time I heard the ding, it confirmed in my mind that I knew that bell far better than my mother did. After a half a dozen or so “dings,” I suddenly heard instead a dull click. The bell had stopped working. I was surprised and a little taken back. My mother really had known what she was talking about!
My mother took the bell from me and tried it a few times herself. She didn’t get a “ding!” either, though, just a dull click. The bell was, in fact, broken and it was my fault.
“See?” she said. “What did I tell you? You didn’t listen to me and now it’s broken. We’re going to have to buy a new one.”
I felt terrible that I’d broken the bell, but only for an instant. Suddenly, my eyes lit up. “I know!” I said. “We can pray about it. We can ask Heavenly Father to fix it!” I could see the doubt in my mother’s eyes. She didn’t know what to do. She’d taught me to pray whenever I needed my Heavenly Father’s help, but surely He wasn’t going to step in and fix a mechanical device that had clearly stopped working. And when He didn’t, I’d be crushed. She didn’t want that.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, finally. “I’m just not sure that’s the thing to do.” Well, in spite of the fact that she’d been right in warning me that the bell would break if I kept playing with it, I knew she was wrong about telling me not to pray about it. I was insistent. Stubbornly I marched off into my bedroom, where I knelt down at the side of my bed. I began my prayer. I told my Heavenly Father that I was sorry I’d disobeyed my mother and had broken the bell, but now I needed His help. I needed Him to fix it. I closed my prayer and hurried back to the other room.
“Okay,” I announced with all the confidence in the world. “Try it now.” Hesitantly, my mother turned the dial to the right and then back to the left. Suddenly, to her surprise (but not really to mine), we both heard a loud, clear, beautiful “ding!”
I think that at that point in my young life, I needed to know that God would hear and answer my prayers. And because this is something I truly needed, He came through for me. I’m sure He knew the effect an unanswered prayer would have on me as a five-year-old. A couple of weeks ago, my stapler broke. I didn’t even consider asking God to fix it. I guess maybe I don’t have the faith now that I had as a five-year-old. but maybe when the car keys miraculously appear after someone’s sincere prayer, God knew that this little thing would have a lasting impact on them. Nowadays, I don’t even always get answers to prayers that seem to me to be every bit as important as the prayer I offered as a five-year-old, but maybe that’s because I’ve now reached the point where I can better understand that God doesn’t work like a genie in a bottle, and that I don’t always get what I want.
I love it. I want to hear you speak in our Ward someday. Thanks Minyan Man wrote:
I love it. I want to hear you speak in our Ward someday. Thanks
Aw… that’s so nice of you. Thanks, Minyan Man!
I would define a miracle as something that happens beyond coincidence. An amputee growing an arm back, or asteroid hurling toward earth being deflected at the last moment. If something would have or could have happened anyway its coincidence not a miracle. Correlation does not mean causation It is somewhat arrogant I think to claim god found your keys but ignores the please of someone in far greater distress.
Is god more concerned that you get to work on time than delivering someone from human bondage?
To apply a miracle to something so mundane as car keys diminishes what a true miracle is.
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Cadence wrote:
I would define a miracle as something that happens beyond coincidence. An amputee growing an arm back, or asteroid hurling toward earth being deflected at the last moment. If something would have or could have happened anyway its coincidence not a miracle. Correlation does not mean causationIt is somewhat arrogant I think to claim god found your keys but ignores the please of someone in far greater distress.
Is god more concerned that you get to work on time than delivering someone from human bondage?
To apply a miracle to something so mundane as car keys diminishes what a true miracle is.
I couldn’t agree more.
DarkJedi wrote:
Cadence wrote:
I would define a miracle as something that happens beyond coincidence. An amputee growing an arm back, or asteroid hurling toward earth being deflected at the last moment. If something would have or could have happened anyway its coincidence not a miracle. Correlation does not mean causationIt is somewhat arrogant I think to claim god found your keys but ignores the please of someone in far greater distress.
Is god more concerned that you get to work on time than delivering someone from human bondage?
To apply a miracle to something so mundane as car keys diminishes what a true miracle is.
I couldn’t agree more.
I also agree.
SilentDawning wrote:
Do you believe in miracles, and are many miracles simply the result of fortuitous circumstances?
Yes, I believe in miracles & yes many miracles are the result of fortuitous circumstances. Many of the circumstances I
experience I choose to identify as a miracle. Someone else may not. I won’t condemn anyone for giving credit to God
when they find their car keys. My dilemma comes when I have a catastrophe where I desperately need an answer or
spiritual comfort & God seems to say “wait for your answer”. By nature I am a very impatient person.
Another option is: maybe God wants us to be the conduit to a spiritual answer to prayer. Bring hope, Bring comfort.
Bring our own experience to someone else’s pain. Telling them they are not alone. The car keys testimonials always
make me smile now. That hasn’t always been the case.
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