Miracles...On Ice and Otherwise

I finally sat down to watch the movie “Miracle” this past weekend. It is a movie about the 1980 United States Olympic Hockey team, and their incredible, if not improbable, gold medal.

I was a kid during this time, but I remember it oh so vividly. The movie does an excellent job of showing how fragile the nation’s psyche was at this moment in history. We had a crisis of confidence in this country, brought on by a lot of different things all going wrong at the same time. Going in to that Olympics, it seemed that we (the U.S.) had lost our way a bit.

Two weeks later, our confidence, and our belief in the impossible, was on its way towards being restored.

The very night that the U.S. Hockey team completed its stunning upset of the team from the Soviet Union, I was seated in a high school gymnasium, watching my brother play basketball. The public address announcer came on in the middle of the game to announce that the hockey team had pulled off the impossible upset. The place erupted in cheers. As a young man, I knew something miraculous had happened that night, even if I didn’t understand the full implications of it.

Looking back, I see now in full how much that simple little hockey game meant to this country. I also see how a team of individuals who have at their core an unshakeable belief can pull off the impossible. Call it a miracle if you will, but its also really about belief.

There are miracles in our lives that are very hard to explain. But, I tend to think that all miracles hold one thing in common, namely a belief by the parties involved that the miraculous can happen. Jesus Christ, in his famous and admittedly hard to interpret Sermon on the Mount, told us all to (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Ask and you shall be answered…”. This particular passage and its meaning has been debated for centuries, and I’m not about to try and solve that debate. But, perhaps it does mean that if we hold perfect belief in our hearts and minds, a belief so unshakable that not even the big bad Soviet Union hockey team of the 1980’s could shake it, our “prayers” will be answered.

Maybe, when we pray for things or events we either want to happen in our lives, or not happen in our lives, we don’t do it with enough gusto, chutzpah, or belief. Perhaps we have to not only ask for our prayers to be answered, but have the unshakable belief beforehand that they will be answered. Maybe, the winning formula for the miraculous to happen is “Belief + Asking = Miracle”.

Again, I don’t know for sure, but these are my suspicions. I’ve seen a lot of “miracles” happen in my life, on the ice and otherwise. Looking back, it does seem that the common denominator in all of them was belief.

Here’s hoping a miracle will visit you all soon.

In the words of the immortal Tug McGraw, “You gotta believe”.

-The Minister