Every so often a survey comes along that makes you set down your coffee and read it twice. This one did that for me. A recent report found that nearly half of Americans say they have received a miraculous answer to prayer. Not a vague feeling. Not a nice sentiment. An answer they would call a miracle.
Now, I know how surveys work. People round up, people remember selectively, and one person's miracle is another person's coincidence. But even accounting for all of that, stop and let the number sit with you. In a culture that is supposedly done with God, tens of millions of ordinary people are quietly carrying a story they cannot fully explain — a healing, a provision, a door that opened, a phone call that came at the exact hour they were on their knees.
That tells me something. It tells me that God has not stopped answering, and people have not stopped asking.
Why we hesitate to say it out loud
Here is what strikes me most. If half of us have a story like this, why do we so rarely hear them? I think it is because a testimony feels risky. You say it out loud and part of you braces for the raised eyebrow. Was it really God, or was it timing? So we keep it tucked away, a private treasure we are half afraid to examine too closely.
But Scripture never treats answered prayer as something to whisper about. It treats it as normal. "This is the confidence that we have in him," John writes, "that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us: and if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him" (1 John 5:14-15). Notice the tone. There is no hedging there. He hears. That is the confidence John hands us — not that we will always get the exact thing on our exact timetable, but that the God we pray to is genuinely listening and genuinely acts.
I believe the Holy Spirit is still doing this today, in living rooms and hospital rooms and kitchen tables across West Michigan. Not as a magic trick. As a Father responding to His children.
The honest part
And I have to be honest, because some of you reading this prayed as hard as you knew how and the answer did not come the way you begged for it. The healing did not happen. The marriage did not mend. The job did not open. I am not going to stand over that survey and pretend those stories do not exist, because they do, and some of them are mine and yours.
Here is what I have learned watching people walk through both — the answered prayer and the silent one. Unanswered, or answered differently, does not mean unheard. Even Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, "if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt" (Matthew 26:39). The cup did not pass. And yet the Father was never more present to the Son than in that garden. Sometimes the miracle is the deliverance. Sometimes the miracle is that you were held together when by all rights you should have come apart.
So if your story is a hard one, you are not a lesser member of that survey. You are welcome here exactly as you are.
What to do with a number like this
I think this statistic is an invitation. If that many people already have a testimony, imagine what happens when we actually start telling them to one another. Faith is contagious. When you hear that God moved for your neighbor, something in you dares to ask again.
This Friday, August 14, we gather for Prayer Night at 7pm. It is a good place to bring whatever you have been carrying — the request you are afraid to say out loud, or the answer you have never told anyone about. Come ask. Come give thanks. Come and simply listen for the Spirit, who is nearer than the room you are standing in.
Nearly half of us have a story. The God who wrote those stories is not finished. He still hears, He still moves, and He still bends low to the one who calls.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.