“Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, "My Lord and my God!" Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, "I do not believe till I see.”

~ Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov

Padre Pio comes to mind when we speak of the miraculous events witnessing to this simple friar's relationship with the divine mystery. All too often the recipient of Padre Pio's intervention encouraged them to do more than thank the priest. They visited their local notary public declaring under oath all that had occured to them when healed from a terminal illness. Those records exist to this day.

Faith in God's presence in our everyday life is much more than healing the terminally ill, it is the awareness that within our understandings we are being influenced to do this, rather than that. When the penny drops and we begin to understand that we are not alone, but being guided through our life, there are good grounds to believe that trusting in our friend's counselling is worth our patience, and time enough to benefit from all that we are experiencing following the call of The Saviour.

The wise student of the road of hard knocks learns from life's daily experiences never to surrender to the limitations imposed upon them those determined to restrain their willingness to trust in the guidance of the interior life, also known to us as The Father's Spirit.

C. S. Lewis was a well respected academic, spending years lecturing at Oxford University. Nevertheless he emphasised the absolute importance of learning our lessons from all that our life's daily experiences are teaching us.

“Experience is the most brutal of teachers but you learn, my God, do you learn”
~ C. S. Lewis

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