We Are each other's miracles

​Yesterday, I was invited to attend and speak to an audience at an event titled: Triumph over Trauma. A group of citizens in northern Virginia has started a trauma informed community network and this was their kickoff event.

It was a challenge to make happen. It's a 2 1/2 hour drive north through that always lovely northern Virginia traffic - and I knew I was going to be hurried to get back home in time for Ian's football game.

But I knew I had to go. Not because I had something to offer, but because I knew this event would have something to offer me. They always do....

After I spoke yesterday, a woman got up and told her story. In many ways it wasn't a story at all, it was like entering someone's nightmare. And I wanted out of her nightmare - right now - but she kept talking.

Talking about the horrific abuse she incurred starting at the age of 3. The dad who took his life; the mom who drank her way through the pain of it all. Falling in love with alcohol herself as a teen - and then weed and then pills. Welcome to addiction. Then along came the children born in the middle of it all, until they were taken away from her. And then the attempts to take herself away from herself - suicide. Over and over.

Please let me out of your nightmare; the layers are too sad and too many to even keep up with.

But then she told the story of waking up one morning. Tired of the nightmare. Feeling the overwhelming presence of God's promise to help her end the nightmare and not her life. And along came the helpers who wanted to hear and know and heal her story.

That's how that story often goes, you know. I've experienced it; I've come to believe it. There is no God's presence without God's people. And without God's people feeling him near, there is no God to point anyone to.

For what good is a God who can't be felt?

What good is a God who can't empower us to bring his miracles to life?

Because here this woman was - now - talking to us. She out of the nightmare and us too. There she was telling us a story of a mom and a wife and a career - a career, by the way, spent helping others. And she had standing beside her the son who had been taken away - and locked away - yet now standing there holding his mom.

With love and pride and acceptance. This was no longer a nightmare - it was a miracle.

My heart broke as I wondered how often over the course of her nightmare had she been defined by the parts of the nightmare we could all see and not the parts buried along with a broken 3 year old?

How many times had she been defined by addict and by bad mom and by worthless human? How many times did those definitions stand in the way of someone reaching in and saving a 3 year old girl while unknowingly - at least I hope unknowingly - adopting new ways to break that little girl over and over again?

Because that is where the healing started; it's where it almost always starts. Not with someone throwing a life preserver to the addiction or the suicide attempts or to the victims of the daily shipwreck - but to the little boy or girl lost inside.

A little girl, who in grabbing that life preserver, starts clinging to a miracle she gave up on long ago.

There we all were, together, listening to her. They we all were, every one of us, miracle workers. We don't know that often enough. We sure don't own it often enough. That our presence in each other's lives IS God's presence. And God's presence is a miracle waiting to happen.

Waiting on us.

I leave those events hoping miracles will one day quit waiting on us. I hear stories like this mom's story and hope we will one day become humans who look beneath the scars of humans - beneath the addictions and mental health illnesses and beneath the offenses - and see the humanity.

A humanity the human itself may never see again without someone finding it for him.

Because that is triumph over trauma - finding the humanity you thought was long gone.

That is the miracle.

And we, my friends - we ARE each other's miracle. We ARE each other's triumph over trauma.