When Is a Miracle Not a Miracle?
A true story
I’m lucky enough to live near my favourite beach. The place is a well-kept secret, incredibly secluded, never crowded, only accessible via a dirt track and a series of steps leading down a cliff. It’s got little caves on one side, rock pools and rugged cliffs on the other and nothing but golden sand in between. The water isn’t warm and the waves aren’t huge, but whether you get into the sea or not it’s an incredibly relaxing place to spend time.
One day as a child I was down there with Mum, and just before we were due to leave I lost my glasses in the sand. My eyesight was awful even then so it was pretty important that we got them back. Mum and I searched along the strand for ages and ages but no matter where we looked we couldn’t find the glasses anywhere. Eventually we had to admit defeat and pack up our stuff.
As we left the beach and started up the steps we bumped into someone coming the other way carrying a metal detector. We couldn’t believe our luck. I’d just lost my glasses, we were right on the point of leaving and of all the people who could possibly turn up to this secluded, empty beach towards evening we got a man wielding a metal detector.
Immediately we set our brave knight to work looking for the glasses around the area I’d last had them. We waited. And waited. And waited. But he wasn’t having any more luck than we’d had. No matter how long we waited and how much ground he covered the glasses didn’t turn up.
Eventually we gave up for the second time that day. We may have given him our number just in case he found something later, I don’t remember. If we did he never called it.
I spent the car journey home thinking ‘If you lose your glasses and don’t find them it’s just one of those things. If someone shows up at the perfect moment with a metal detector and finds them for you it’s a sign. But if someone shows up at the perfect moment with a metal detector and doesn’t find them, what do you call that?’