You Speak of Signs and Wonders

There are some fantastic, selfless and amazing people who work in the NHS, and I'm really grateful for them. There is also a fantastic and frustrating amount of bureaucracy, which I'm not so pleased about! Bureaucracy which has meant that we have spent the last nine months trying to get an appointment for our youngest to see a Ear Nose and Throat specialist, to see we need to do anything about the fact that most of the time he can't hear. 

We thought we were getting somewhere last month, when after several months of being passed back and forwards between the GP, Speech Therapist and Audiology, we finally got a referral to the ENT department... only to be told that the earliest they could even think about taking a booking for an appointment was the end of March, with an unspecified wait after that for the actual appointment itself. 

At this point, we started to despair, wondering about going private, and what else we could do, when suddenly, not 24 hours after being told that there were no appointments at all, we get a phone call out of the blue offering us an appointment next Saturday! 

To Sarah and I, this was clear evidence of God at work - of how He looks out and provides for us. No doubt some people reading this will want to offer a different, more mundane explanation - but at the end of the day, whether this came about from a miraculous intervention, or just because the bureaucracy finally caught up with the demands, then I still see God at work.

Sometimes I think as Christians we can get caught up on Signs and Wonders - on miraculous interventions. I've been in Christian circles where the dominant view seems to be that if you haven't seen at least six miraculous things before breakfast, there's something wrong with your faith and you need to repent of whatever sin is holding you back, but I don't really buy that. Although I believe God can and does do the miraculous, my experience is that He is just as likely to work through the everyday - through the normal mundane things, because He is the God of the everyday and the normal and mundane, just as much as He is the God of the miraculous and supernatural. 

And as I right this another question occurs to me - I wonder what would happen if we, His people here, got just a little bit better at giving God the glory and praise and thanks for the everyday and mundane things he does? I wonder if then, perhaps, we might be more likely to see His miraculous power at work as well?