Pain doesn't diminish a miracle, sometimes it is the miracle

​Three days into his earthly ministry and his relationship with his disciples, Jesus worked his first public miracle. The bible tells us:

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”

Most of us, whether we follow Jesus or not, know what happened next. Jesus turned water into enough wine to last the whole wedding feast.

It's interesting, the Jesus who could turn water into wine clearly could have prevented the wine from running out at all, right? So why did he?

Why didn't Jesus prevent what he clearly could have prevented.

It's a question I've asked myself at times when trying to solve the mystery of my own relationship with God. Most recently, I suppose, I've found myself asking God that question about my divorce.

God, you clearly could have intervened here, why didn't you? You could have worked a miracle no one else could have seen coming and no one else could have worked, why didn't you?

In the years since my divorce, I've learned a lot about myself. Most importantly, I've come to intimately understand why I've struggled all of my life with any kind of intimate relationship. And not the least of those relationships I've struggled with has been my relationship with God.

And the truth is, as very sad as this truth is, as long as I was in my marriage I was always going to see the root of my problem as the other person, or me, or God. My problem was always going to be about the people in my relationships and not the general fears and shame I felt in the midst of any meaningful relationship with anyone.

It's been on the other side of the lowest point in my life that I've come to the highest understanding of my life. I had to run out of my own capacity to do a relationship for God to begin to teach me how to do a relationship.

For anyone reading who might be thinking I'm giving the okay to divorce, I'm not. I have just come to know in my own personal relationship with Jesus that if I look back and get caught up in right or wrong or okay or not okay, I can miss the depths of his miracle.

If I lose sight of a God who had to endure watching his son die on a cross, I can lose sight of the truth that God doesn't always have to feel joy in what he's witnessing in our lives to work a miracle in our lives.

At the end of the water to wine story, the bible tells us, "What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him."

The reality is, if Jesus had prevented the wine from running out, he would have been prevented from working a miracle that drew his disciples closer to him than they'd been in their early days together.

And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God has allowed some things to painfully run out in my life to draw me closer to him than I've ever been. And to prepare me for relationships I never could have had without the pain of discovering all the reasons why I've been so relationally ill-equipped all of my life.

Sometimes it's easy to grasp the miracle of the Jesus who can turn water into wine. That Jesus gets a standing ovation. It's much harder, though, to grasp and applaud the miracle of the Jesus who would allow the wine to run out in the first place.

But sometimes that's what he does. He let's the wine run out.

And it's painful.

But if Jesus of the cross taught us anything, it's that pain doesn't diminish a miracle. In fact, it's pain that is often at the heart of it.