Guest blog--Expecting Miracles

Guest blogger Diana Savage shares Easter insights with Sun Breaks readers today. To read more of her humorous, unique perspectives on life and living, go to her website at www.woundedchristians.com.

“In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3 NIV).

Although he knew he had little chance of success, Ross tried to get his young children to have some dinner after they’d already consumed a basketful of candy eggs and chocolate bunnies.

“They’re not going to eat,” the children’s grandmother told him. “It’s Easter Sunday. What do you expect, a miracle?”

One of the joys of the Christian life is experiencing divine miracles. God’s amazing power was never more evident than when Jesus rose from the dead. Today we celebrate that marvelous event.

Let’s get one thing straight. Christ’s crucified body was as dead as the tomb it lay in. Jesus wasn’t in a coma or faking death or any other wild rationalization some people use to deny the truth. Plenty of credible eyewitnesses confirmed the fact that his heart had stopped beating before he was wrapped in grave clothes and buried. As the apostle Peter declared some six weeks later, “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it” (Acts 2:32).

Divine miracles have continued since then—in the form of supernatural healing, protection, provision, and deliverance—in answer to Christians’ faith-filled prayers. However, not every prayer is answered by a miracle. Sometimes God accompanies us through our trials instead of delivering us out of them. Unfortunately, feeling as if God is ignoring our pleas can lead to doubting that God loves us as much as Scripture claims.

That’s understandable. And platitudes offered by well-meaning people—we have sin in our lives, we don’t have enough faith, or God sent the trial to straighten us out—often hurt more than they help. I know people who simply give up asking God for anything. Some even leave the Christian faith altogether.

After my son died on his first birthday, I stopped praying for awhile. Wounded spiritually and emotionally, I wondered what the point was in asking God for anything when he’d denied the request that mattered to me the most. I would have given everything I owned in exchange for my son’s life. Evidently that wasn’t enough, I thought.

Although I couldn’t pray in the traditional sense, I did beg God not to send along any further trial that would completely wipe out my remaining fragment of fragile faith. He answered. For a long time I was left undisturbed in an emotional fetal position. When I eventually gathered enough courage to formulate a request for something small, the reply came swiftly. I ventured another tiny request. The answer arrived before I’d even finished praying. Thus began my long road to spiritual recovery. As I reestablished my prayer life, I rediscovered the truth that in order to receive, we must ask (see James 4:2).

My recovery was not due to my own strength. True power for victorious living comes from the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. The apostle Paul talked about that power when he said:

And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.
Romans 8:11

I can only imagine the surge of power that rejuvenated Christ’s corpse in that stone-cold tomb on Easter morning. Talk about a miracle! And yet Scripture declares that when God transformed us into new creations in Christ, the same Holy Spirit who brought Jesus back from the dead also took up residence in each one of us, imparting his vibrant, pulsating life to our mortal bodies.

I’m not claiming weird powers or that our physical bodies will never die. I don’t fully understand how it all works. But I have seen enough miracles in my own life and in the lives of people around me to be convinced of the truth of Romans 8:11.

So today, as we celebrate Christ’s miraculous, glorious resurrection, let’s remember that we can anticipate miracles year round—even on days that seem more ridiculous than sublime—because of the mighty one who lives within us.

Thank you, Lord, that when we trust in you as Savior, you bless our lives with the power of the resurrection. Help us to believe you for the miraculous all year long.

© 2012 by Diana Savage. All rights reserved.

Arizona Album, February

Early morning hillside

These are a few of the photos we took last month near Tucson, Arizona. Click on the pictures for a larger view.

Spring starts small in the desert

Catalina Mountain Stream

This car was new when its driver ignored a "Do Not Enter if Flooded" sign at a low spot in the road. She escaped with her life but a flash flood washed the vehicle down the mountain.

When the sun goes down, the temperature drops. Time to go home!

How about a hug?

Pottery for sale at a market

Shadow patterns at Sweetwater Wetlands

Shoveler drake and reeds

Granddog, Bella

Rocks of the Texas Canyon formation

Desert cloud patterns

Sign for new tavern on 4th Street, Tucson

Where's Waldo?

Signs of spring in the shelter of a saquaro cactus

A rainstorm barrels toward Tucson over the Santa Cruz River

Birds find shelter in the saquaros, too.

Fairy dusters in Saquaro National Monument

A chilly roadrunner warms himself by fluffing his feathers and turning his back to the morning sun.

A Place for Remembering

Poston Camp #1 in April, 1942, just before the first internees arrived

Today the road through Arizona’s Parker Valley runs arrow-straight between flat green rectangles of alfalfa. Shimmering irrigation ditches carry water to them from the nearby Colorado River, the boundary between Arizona and California. Mountains hem the valley on either side.

    This part of Arizona is verdant now, but sixty years ago, it was a desolate desert reservation where Mohave and Chemeheuvi Indians lived in poverty. There were too few of them for the government to allocate funds to build irrigation canals so they could farm their barren lands.

    Then, when war-time hysteria forced Japanese-Americans from their West Coast homes and businesses, the Poston Relocation Center was hastily thrown up on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. Officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs saw an opportunity to bring in money from the War Department budget to make improvements and develop agricultural land. They also saw the advantage of thousands of “volunteers” to do the work, who could remain after the war and swell the reservation’s permanent population. The Tribal Council refused to be part of this plan, having themselves been “relocated” and forced to leave their homes and lands, but the BIA overrode the council.

    Starting in April, 1942, more than seventeen thousand Japanese-Americans were brought to the outpost at Poston, where they were crowded together in unfinished board-and-tarpaper barracks, twenty feet by one hundred feet. Depending upon the number of people per family, up to four families were assigned to each building.

    Actually, three complexes lay several miles apart, unofficially named "Roasten," "Toasten," and "Dustin" by their residents. Poston was not only the largest of the ten Western internment camps, it was also the hottest. Desert temperatures climbed to 115 degrees in the summer, exacerbated by humidity from the nearby Colorado River.

    When the first evacuees arrived, however, heat was not the problem.  Winter days were cool, the nights cold, and stoves had not yet been installed in the barracks. Winds stirred up blinding dust storms and whistled through the walls and floorboards. Sometimes torrential downpours turned the dirt streets and walkways into quagmires.

    Why were Japanese-Americans subjected to such treatment?

    When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, people along the West Coast panicked. Some thought that every person of Japanese heritage had the potential of being a spy - or worse. Soon, community leaders began to agitate for their removal.

    On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The order authorized the establishment of zones from which anybody could be excluded. Immediately afterward, the evacuation and internment of 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry began on the West Coast. Those sent to Poston came mostly from Southern California.

    During their three years of internment, the Japanese-Americans, many of whom were American-born and citizens, were forced to do the backbreaking work of building a working canal system, clearing fields, making their own adobe bricks for school buildings, and raising crops, pigs, and chickens for their own use. They established their own library, hospital, and other necessities. They even had a factory where they made camouflage netting for the war effort.

    While their families attempted to continue life in as normal a fashion as possible, more than twelve hundred men and women from Poston served with the United States military forces. Of the 117 casualties, twenty-five soldiers died for their country.

    Those twenty-five, and the other internees who suffered at the hands of their own country at Poston, are honored with a memorial near the site of the camp. Very little else remains to tell the story of their presence there, although in a way, the miles and miles of emerald alfalfa fields are a legacy. When the war ended and the evacuees were allowed to return to homes and businesses that in many cases no longer existed, the government lured members of the Hopi and Navajo tribes to the reservation with promises of good farming, running water, and other improvements to their lives.

    Dennis Patch, a council member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, grew up in a house that used to be one of the barracks. He said of the Japanese, “They built the schools here, they built the roads here, they developed the acreage into fields here, they brought the power down the center of the reservation. So up until that time, we as Native people were without running water, restroom facilities, without electricity. From their suffering, we gained a lot.”

    As one stands at the Poston monument and ponders the story, one must ask, “Was the suffering worth it for America?” By the end of the war, only ten people in the entire country had been convicted of spying for Japan.

     And all of them were white.

This memorial is dedicated to all those men, women and children who suffered countless hardships and indignities at the hands of a nation misguided by mass hysteria, racial prejudice and fear. May it serve as a constant reminder of our past so that Americans in the future will never again be denied their constitutional rights and may the
remembrance of that experience serve to advance the evolution of the human spirit.

(Dedication on the Poston Memorial)

Those from Poston who fought and died for America

Alfalfa bales and fields, looking west from the Poston Monument toward the Colorado River.