It was two weeks away from the beginning of the school year that I would be starting eighth grade in a new school because we had recently moved to Wichita Falls, Texas and we were still living in temporary housing on base. There was noone my age to hang out with and I was tired of being with my younger brother. I was feeling upset, mad, lonely, and abandoned. I was missing my friends and had not yet met anyone new.
As I was walking back to the temporary housing unit from the one swing, one slide, half-court playground, I was really upset. I reached the unpaved, stone parking lot in front of the temporary quarters and I fell and bloodied my knee and palms. I looked down at my hands and thought to myself, “God, why do you hate me?”
I picked myself up, grabbed a couple of the stones and started throwing them into the open field by the parking lot. As I was about to through the last stone, I looked at it instead and said, “God, if you really care about me, show me by changing this stone into something else, anything else but a rock, I don't care what it is, just change it.” I waited, and I waited, and I waited some more. Finally I threw the stone back down. I said, “God, if you are really there, show me a sign - any sign.” I stood there for a few more minutes and then walking away in discuss saying, “That’s what I thought.” I was in the same mood the rest of the week.
On Friday my dad told us we were going to go to the chapel that Sunday with someone he knew from work and then go over to their house for lunch. We were all looking forward to this because we only had a stove top in our temporary quarters and we were all ready for something else to eat that did not come out of the can or from the base dining hall. Since I was still either mad with God or not sure there was a God, I decide that sitting in church in order to get a real meal was worth it.
The base chapel had a youth service at the same time as the regular service, so I went to that hoping that I would at least meet someone my age. Finding none, I sat there stewing-in-my-own-juices as my Mom use to say. One of the others who were there asked the leader, “God does all these great miracles in the Bible, how come He doesn’t do that now? How come He doesn’t give us as sign that He’s real?”
The leader’s answer was simple, “Jesus said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'”
Wow! I got an answer! And it was also funny to me because the sign God gave me was someone saying that we should not ask for signs. I started to laugh and was asked what was so funny. I started to tell my story, but for some reason I just said, “nothing,” and sat quietly the rest of the the time thinking about this answer, this “non-miracle” to everyone else in the room, this small, very personal miracle.
Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” Luke 4:12
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