A window washer who fell 47 stories from a New York City skyscraper is now awake, talking to his family, and expected to walk again. Alcides Moreno’s story is extraordinary: The death rate from a three-story fall is about 50 percent and those who fall more than 10 stories almost never survive. “If you are a believer in miracles,” said the hospital’s chief of surgery, Dr. Philip Barie, “this would be one.”

What other stories can you share of miraculous occurrences?

Cold enough finally to put on Spider’s coat.

I have seen 56 turnings of fall to winter, and roughly 20,000 risings and settings of the sun, and these are so regular as to seem on autopilot. But the regularity of the world is merely the faithfulness of God. If you see a night watchman who unfailingly makes his rounds, or a citizen who always pays his utility bill, you do not say he is on autopilot. You say he keeps his promises. What we call the “laws of nature” are nothing but descriptions, as best we can approximate, of the sovereignty of God.

When God performs a “miracle,” He is choosing to deviate from His regularity in a particular instance. It’s still all of God either way.

What’s the “so what?” factor in all this? (God’s truth is always relevant.) It is that God is always a God who is near me and not far away. What a sad man the Deist must be, to think that God is like a child who wound up a toy and then walked away bored. See the intimacy of our God’s involvement in our affairs:

“He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly. He gives snow like wool; he scatters hoarfrost like ashes. He hurls down His crystals of ice like crumbs” (Psalm 147:15-17)

Okay, then, bring on the winter spectacle, my King! (238)