So it’s 2022 and this here blog started out 20 years ago in 2002. In celebration of all those twos and zeroes — and as a way of ensuring more frequent threads — we’ll be posting On This Day flashbacks throughout the year.
This is from January 4, 2006, “Broken news and ‘miracles’“:
So I’m uncomfortable with the casual use of the word “miracle” in the pulpit. And I’m even more uncomfortable with the use of that word in the newsroom.
That’s what we were chatting about last night at around 2:35 or so as the final copies of our morning edition rolled off the presses.
Then we watched as the families’ joy turned into grief and their hope turned into despair. Their joy had been infused with theological meaning and gratitude for a miraculous answer to prayer. When it turned out there had been no miracle (or, in Gov. Manchin’s words, 11 fewer miracles), their grief was likewise infused with theological meaning.
“We’re Christian people ourselves,” one grief-stricken family member said. “We have got — some of us is right down to saying that we don’t even know if there is a Lord anymore. We had a miracle, and it was taken away from us.”
That will sound to some like a woman who has lost her faith in God. To me it sounds like the presence of such faith — like someone struggling to figure out what her faith in God means after life has dealt her a cruel blow.
I don’t have any easy answers for this poor woman. There are no easy answers for her.
And if I cannot provide such answers as a theologian, then I certainly shouldn’t be trying to provide such answers as a copy editor.
It’s a miracle, of sorts, that the CNN link in that post is still working 16 years later.
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