Thursday my coworkers (Jong Dae and Mi Hyoung Choi and Kara Lancaster) and I taught our weekly Good News Bible Club about John 2, Jesus first miracle (turning water to wine). As we studied the passage the week before teaching it, my coworkers and I brainstormed about impossibilities in our lives, and God’s sometimes unexpected ways of meeting these needs. We talked about health problems, we talked about betrayals of friendship, we talked about financial struggles. As we looked deeper into the passage, we realized that without the groomsman’s humiliating miscalculation in wine, without the complete impossibility of the situation, there could never have been a miracle! We thought about the storms on the Sea of Galilee, the lack of food for thousands of people, the devastating deaths of loved ones–and realized that in Jesus’ eyes,
IMPOSSIBILITY IS THE FERTILE GROUND FOR MIRACLES.
During that Thursday club, we asked the kids about some of their problems. We tried to get a three-year-old little boy to stop burrowing under the couch cushions, rubbing his socks under peoples’ noses, and jumping on peoples’ laps. We tried to teach the Bible verse despite the constant interruptions of kids who wanted to be in the spotlight. I tried to tell the kids the missionary kid story (about a Moroccan, Muslim boy named Hamed who runs away from home and eventually meets Jesus), but I included too much review from the previous chapters, which frustrated the kids. Somewhere in the middle of the mayhem, I looked up at the ceiling and wondered, “God, You used 12 mottley disciples to change the world. If impossibility is Your fertile ground for miracles, can You use me to change these kids’ worlds?” We taught the kids the Bible story of turning water to wine. At the end of the story, we brought out a pitcher which had, unknown to the kids, grape Kool-Aid powder in the bottom. As a kid poured water into the pitcher–voila!–”wine!” Their eyes bugged out; they really grasped the wonder of an impossibility becoming a miracle (until they figured out our secret at the end of the club). The kids insisted on tasting the “wine,” and were intrigued by the flavor. “It almost tastes like grape, but it’s really sour… kinda yucky.” “Why would anyone ever drink this stuff?” “Nasty!”
I may be inept, but I know when there’s something that wrong. “Lemme taste it, guys,” I said, taking the glass.
“It’s nasty–don’t drink it,” the boy next to me whispered warningly.
“I know–that’s why I have to try it,” I muttered, and took a sip. *blech* We forgot to add sugar! “So that’s what wine tastes like,” one of the kids mused.
Despite the sugarless setback (which the kids temporarily blamed on the “wine”), the kids got the point! “My old BFF [best friend forever] just picked a new best friend, and now she’s mean to me in recess,” one girl mentioned. “I have way too much homework,” someone else contributed. We asked the kids how they could take these seeming impossibilities to Jesus, encouraging the kids to expect Him to respond. Sometimes His miracles are as obvious as turning water into wine. Other times, He helps us cope with the situation–or uses natural methods to resolve it. Either way, our impossibilities are the fertile ground for God’s miracles.
