Many times in our lives we petition the Lord in fervent prayer for a miracle. We commonly understand this word, “miracle,” to mean that God has intervened in our lives to produce some unlooked-for or longed-for but greatly desirable good. Two people meant for each other meet by barest chance, a child’s life is spared when death was at the door, a man receives unlooked-for but very needed income, a woman is healed from a grave physical affliction. We think of miracles as producing life, health, love, relief from poverty.
But if we only think of miracles in that way, we are missing something. Yes, these things are miracles—they are miracles of light. I have experienced those, and they are supernal. But today I am here to speak to you of the other miracles: the dark miracles: miracles of illness, suffering, pain, poverty, estrangement from loved ones, sorrow, and death in the lives of the innocent. I speak only of the good-hearted, because for the wicked, these things are not miracles, but rather consequences of their choices. To begin this discussion, I’d like to start with an extended quote from my favorite Church talk of all time, Carlfred Broderick’s “The Uses of Adversity”:
“While I was a stake president, the event occurred that I want to use as the keynote to my remarks. I was sitting on the stand at a combined meeting of the stake Primary board and stake Young Women’s board where they were jointly inducting from the Primary into the Young Women’s organization the eleven-year-old girls who that year has made the big step. They had a lovely program. It was one of those fantastic, beautiful presentations—based on the Wizard of Oz, or a take-off on the Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy, an eleven-year-old girl, was coming down the yellow brick road together with the tin woodman, the cowardly lion, and the scarecrow. They were singing altered lyrics about the gospel. And Oz, which was one wall of the cultural hall, looked very much like the Los Angeles temple. They really took off down that road. There were no weeds on that road; there were no munchkins; there were no misplaced tiles; there was no wicked witch of the west. That was one antiseptic yellow brick road, and it was very, very clear that once they got to Oz, they had it made. It was all sewed up.
“Following that beautiful presentation with all the snappy tunes and skipping and so on, came a sister who I swear was sent over from Hollywood central casting. (I do not believe she was in my stake; I never saw her before in my life.) She looked as if she had come right off the cover of a fashion magazine—every hair in place, with a photogenic returned missionary husband who looked like he came out of central casting and two or three, or heaven knows how many, photogenic children all of whom came out of central casting or Kleenex ads or whatever. She enthused over her temple marriage and how wonderful life was with her charming husband and her perfect children and that the young women too could look like her and have a husband like him and children like them if they would stick to the yellow brick road and live in Oz. It was a lovely, sort of tear-jerking event.
“After the event was nearly over, the stake Primary president, who was conducting, made a grave strategic error. She turned to me and pro forma, said, “President Broderick, is there anything you would like to add to this lovely evening?”
“I said, “Yes there is,” and I don’t think she has ever forgiven me. What I said was this, “Girls, this has been a beautiful program. I commend the gospel with all of its auxiliaries and the temple to you, but I do not want you to believe for one minute that if you keep all the commandments and live as close to the Lord as you can and do everything right and fight off the entire priests quorum one by one and wait chastely for your missionary to return and pay your tithing and attend your meetings, accept calls from the bishop, and have a temple marriage, I do not want you to believe that bad things will not happen to you. And when that happens, I do not want you to say that God was not true. Or, to say, ‘They promised me in Primary, they promised me when I was [in Young Women’s], they promised me from the pulpit that if I were very, very good, I would be blessed. But the boy I want doesn’t know I exist, or the missionary I’ve waited for and kept chaste so we both could go to the temple turned out to be a flake,’ or far worse than any of the above. Sad things—children who are sick or developmentally handicapped, husbands who are not faithful, [children who choose to be estranged despite your great love for them], illnesses that can cripple, or violence, betrayals, hurts, deaths, losses—when those things happen, do not say that God is not keeping His promises to me. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not insurance against pain. It is resource in event of pain, and when that pain comes (and it will come because we came here on earth to have pain among other things), when it comes, rejoice that you have resources to deal with your pain” (Broderick, 1989: 171-173; square bracket note added).
Brothers and sisters, adversity is not something that accidentally happens to us because we are in a fallen world. Adversity is one of the most important reasons we wanted to come to mortality. We are taught that the first principle of the Gospel is sacrifice, but we may not understand the depth of that teaching. We are not meant to be merely discomfited by earth life; we are meant to ache to the very marrow of our bones. And this is not some capricious requirement set down by an unfeeling God from on high; rather it is something that we ourselves understood fully in our premortal existence, it is something that we sincerely desired and chose for ourselves. Further, I believe that in many instances, we ourselves planned what we would undergo, with input from the Lord.
I know this because of a blessing that was given to my son John when he was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. We were told in a blessing that having cystic fibrosis was John’s plan to bring about great good, and that he showed his plan to Heavenly Father, who approved of it. As Francine Bennion once wrote, “We suffer because, like Christ in the desert, we apparently did not say we would come only if God would change all our stones to bread in time of hunger. We were willing to know hunger. Like Christ in the desert, we did not ask God to let us try falling or being bruised only on condition that he catch us before we touch ground and save us from real hurt. We were willing to know hurt.” (Bennion, 1988)
But why? Are the family of God all masochists who find some perverse pleasure in suffering? No, we are not. But because we are the family of God, I think we understood before we came to this mortal life that the uses of adversity in the lives of the innocent are many and good. Even our Savior Jesus Christ says that he shrank from drinking the bitter cup, and would that it would pass from him, but he did drink it down at last. Christ was no masochist; he took no pleasure in his own exquisite suffering, but he did understand its powerfully transformative objective.
There are several purposes of the dark miracles, and I’d like to mention several in the hopes that might give comfort to some who read these words.
1—The dark miracles of adversity strip us of the natural man; the broken heart can be made new by these dark miracles. In the midst of immense suffering, emotional or physical, nothing else exists besides you and God. No pride, no cares of the world, no pleasures, no natural man—you and God, mano a mano. He can remake you in that extremity and give you a new heart. I guess some people believe I am a masochist because I had natural childbirth with my six children, but I learned in that way the power of suffering to remake hearts. With my first child, I was 38 hours in labor, back labor, and at times I could feel my spirit start to leave my body because of how great the pain was—but when the ordeal was over, I was not the woman I was before. There was a mighty change in my heart. This was not just a physical ordeal; rather, through the physical ordeal, my heart was somehow reorganized into something it had not been before, and welded to give it strength and fortitude. The idea that suffering has the power to produce the deepest change is one of the great mysteries of God. Nevertheless, we know from what Christ experienced during the Atonement that this principle is true.
And from this and other experiences I know that in the midst of great adversity, one can keenly feel the gentle grace of God in the continued beating of our heart: what does it mean, “my grace is sufficient for thee”? There are many who know the miracle of being able to go on for one more hour, or even for some, the gift of being able to go on for just one more minute. I know that miracle, too. To feel that grace is, I believe, one of the reasons for adversity, for it cannot be felt in any other context. You cannot be touched by that intimate, personal grace and remain unchanged.
Indeed, adversity gives us the opportunity to take up our own cross and thereby claim kinship with Christ—how unworthy we will feel if we never knew what suffering really meant, how uncomfortable and ashamed we would feel in his presence. To be Christ’s brother, sister, friend, we need and we want to know what He knows because of the cross.
2—Dark miracles in our own lives can, in a way unlooked-for, bring good to those we love: Carlfred Broderick tells the story of a woman who was horribly abused as a child—physically, sexually, and emotionally, and who struggled with depression ever after. When he laid his hands upon her head as her stake president, he was moved to tell her that she was “a valiant Christlike spirit who volunteered to come to earth and suffer innocently to purify a lineage. She volunteered to absorb the poisoning of sin, anger, anguish, and violence, to take it into herself and not to pass it on; to purify a lineage so that downstream from her it ran pure and clean, full of love and the Spirit of the Lord and self-worth. I believed truly that her calling was to be a savior on Mount Zion; that is, to be Savior-like, like the Savior to suffer innocently that others might not suffer” (Broderick, 1989:178). I believe my Johnny offered to have CF for the good of our family. I do not fully comprehend his full plan, but I have faith in it. And I myself have strived not to pass on the unfortunate legacy that my parents left their children. With Sister Bennion, I say, “One of my prayers to my Father is that my children will be healed of my ignorance and will not bear forever the difficulties caused by things I have mistakenly done or not done as a parent.” (Bennion, 1988)
It is also worth considering that dark miracles can also catalyze good works in the broader world: I think here of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, MADD, a group of mothers who lost children in accidents where a DUI was involved. They have worked hard over decades to lower legal blood alcohol limits for drivers and to increase penalties for DUI. Could they have accomplished what they did without the sorrow they felt? Though at times our activity will not result in the longed-for result, just as not every person prayed over, fasted over, wept over, will recover, yet at times that activity will indeed bring real positive change in the world. In the case of MADD, the changes in the law they lobbied for saved the lives of many people.
3—We must also acknowledge that the suffering of innocents permits God’s punishments of the wicked to be just. We remember the exchange between Alma and Amulek in Alma 14:10-11: “And when Amulek saw the pain of the women and children who were consuming in the fire, he also was pained; and he said unto Alma, How can we witness this awful scene? Therefore let us stretch forth our hands, and exercise the power of God which is in us, and save them from the flames. But Alma said unto him: The Spirit constraineth me that I must not stretch forth mine hand; for behold the Lord receiveth them up unto himself, in glory; and he doth suffer that they may do this thing, or that the people may do this thing unto them, according to the hardness of their hearts, that the judgments which he shall exercise upon them in his wrath may be just; and the blood of the innocent shall stand as a witness against them, yea, and cry mightily against them at the last day.” I teach a class on global women’s issues at Texas A&M, and recently read the story of a little girl in Southeast Asia who was sold into sex slavery when she was 9 years old, forced to have sex with as many as 10 men a day, spending most of her life in a caged room. She had a baby at 13, who was taken from her by her owners, and she does not know what happened to him. She is 14, and is dying of AIDS, and has been thrown out into the streets by her owners. I cannot help but believe that God did not rescue this sweet child with a miracle of light because He wanted to make certain that those who tortured her body and soul could never escape His righteous vengeance.
4—Adversity also allows us see firsthand that God has the power to turn adversity for our good, the power to turn lemons into lemonade—and that that is His good will for those who love Him. I remember the morning my first husband, a non-member, walked in from the garden and announced he was leaving. I had a 2 year old and a 2 month old at the time. I remember weeping, weeping, days and nights of weeping, and yet there was this still, small voice that said, “You don’t understand: this is the happiest day of your life.” Now of course I see that it was; I am now married in the temple to a wonderful man, we have added six children to our family, and I am free to live my religion. My dear brothers and sisters, one of the most important things I have learned in this life is that a lot of the fish God gives us look initially like serpents, and many of the loaves look like stones. We must have faith that those stones could one day be seen by us as bread.
5—In addition, dark miracles cultivate in us virtues we may lack, such as strength, patience, and compassion, which we might not otherwise exert ourselves to cultivate. Broderick tells the story of his stepfather, who had been a strong, athletic man, and a good bishop and good father, who developed pulmonary fibrosis, wasted away to skin and bones, and could hardly breathe at all in the last months of his life. He asked his stepfather, “Vic, what have you learned from this six months of wasting away? He said, “Patience; I was never patient. The Lord has taught me patience. I wanted to die six months ago, and He left me. I’ve had to wait upon Him.” Broderick says, “That man did not waste those six months before he died; he spent them being refined. . . .I do not want you to think that it was the pain that was good. It was the man that was good and that made the pain work for him, as indeed our Savior did” (Broderick, 1989:186-187; emphasis added.)
6—I also believe unfulfilled prayers and unrealized blessings can lead us to a conviction beyond sight, a faith like an iron rod. It has been said, “We do not have faith that God must do what we entreat Him to do” (Broderick, 1989:189). When the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk radioed their headquarters across the Channel about the gravity of their position, which was untenable given the Nazi force bearing down upon them, these are the three words that they sent: “But if not.” You may remember those words from the book of Daniel, where three believers were thrown by the king into the fire. They told the king that they knew God could save them, but if not, they would still not renounce their faith. That is the type of faith we seek. Elder Dennis E. Simmons has commented, “We must have the faith of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. Our God will deliver us from ridicule and persection, but if not . . . Our God will deliver us from sickness and disease, but if not . . . He will deliver us from loneliness, depression, or fear, but if not . . . Our God will deliver us from threats, accusations, and insecurity, but if not . . . He will deliver us from death or impairment of loved ones, but if not . . . Our God will see that we receive justice and fairness, but if not . . . He will make sure that we are loved and recognized, but if not . . . We will receive a perfect companion and righteous and obedient children, but if not . . . we will [nevertheless] have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, knowing that if we do all we can do, we will, in His time and in His way, be delivered and receive all that He has” (Simmons, 2004:75).
7—Dark miracles can also help us see that death, at least for the innocent, is a great good, and can be as great a miracle as life—indeed, in a way, death brings new life. I once read a story in the Church News by a sister names Carla Cheney Carter: “Many years ago, I lay in a hospital bed waiting for a call from the newborn intensive care unit where my two-day-old son was in extremely critical condition. The call came and I was told by a well-meaning person that in spite of the seriousness of the situation, if we just had enough faith my son would live. I hung up the phone and lay in bed thinking to myself, “Faith—my son’s life depends upon my faith.” What an overwhelming feeling that was. I started praying. I pleaded and begged my Heavenly Father for my son’s life—that he would be healed and live. As I did this, I had the strangest sensation that the ceiling over me was solid—that my prayers weren’t going anywhere. After a while the realization came to me that I was praying for the wrong thing—I needed to know the Lord’s will for my son. I started to pray in great humility. I told my Heavenly Father that I knew this little boy was His child, that I knew He had the power to heal Thomas if it was His will, and then I acknowledged that if it wasn’t, I would accept His will, that I would do my best to trust Him. Minutes later, I got the call telling me that my beautiful little boy had died. What I learned through the days and weeks and years that followed was that it took great faith to bow to my Heavenly Father’s will and to let go of my little boy, to trust in Heavenly Father’s love and care and His promises for a future with my son—perhaps even greater faith than it would have taken for Thomas to be healed—as I wanted him to be” (Carter, 2007: 2; emphasis added).
I know for myself that death can be a miracle, and an answer to prayer. That a loved one is freed from the suffering and sorrow and trials of this life, and is now in the safety of the Savior’s arms, where none can hurt them, and where the loved ones they never knew in this mortal life can embrace them once more, is a great, great good and miracle. The day before my darling daughter Ariel died at age eighteen, the Spirit told me that God had heard my prayers and pleadings for her and that she would from that moment be delivered from the power of those who sought her destruction. I had no idea that God would fulfill His promise by taking her life less than 24 hours later, but in retrospect it made sense. Though the grief that has come to me from Ariel’s death remains very hard to bear, I have never for a moment not seen it as the greatest miracle and gift from God. Here in this life we see death almost in the same manner as we view a photographic negative—the picture is the same, truly, but we see the opposite of what it really is. For the innocent, death is a miracle of love.
8—Adversity can also paint a dark backdrop by which a miracle of light will stand out: Jesus’ apostles asked him about the man who was born blind, inquiring as to whether he or his parents had sinned, but Jesus replied that he was born blind so that the miracle of light he would receive would shine all the brighter. In any work of art, including the work of art that is our own lives, unless there is dark to show off the light, the light does not appear as beautiful and precious as it otherwise would.
9—And finally, adversity teaches that the only true hope is an ultimate hope—a hope in the victory of Christ and the reality of the land of milk and honey that he has promised us; a land where all tears are wiped away and the lion lies down with the lamb. Paul said of the great ones of old, such as Abel and Noah and Sarah, “these all died in the faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them” (Hebrews 11:4-13). God is not dead, nor doth he sleep. But in every life there will be promises that can only be seen afar off, and cannot be obtained in this life, no matter how righteous we are, no matter how much faith we have. But we believe the promises are true, because Christ was born, atoned for us sins, died, and was resurrected. It is the risen Lord that is our only hope. You may remember that in the final Nephite-Lamanite wars, Mormon describes the horrible afflictions faced especially by the women and children--how Nephite women and children were forced by their Lamanite captors to feed on the flesh of their husbands and fathers, and how Lamanite women were raped, tortured and killed, and their flesh eaten by their Nephite captors as a taken of bravery (Moroni 9:7-19). But immediately after recounting these horrors, Mormon goes on to say to his son, to whom he is writing, something which we would do well to remember (Moroni 9:25):
“My son, be faithful in Christ; and may not the things which I have written thee grieve thee, to weigh down unto death, but may Christ lift thee up, and may his sufferings and death, and the showing his body unto our fathers, and his mercy and long-suffering, and the hope of his glory and of eternal life, rest in your mind forever.”
That is the whole of the good news of the Gospel. The promises are sure, but you may not see any of them in this life. The unfulfilled prayer, the unrealized blessing, the rescue that does not come, the longed-for miracle that does not happen—these are hard, hard trials—I know this of myself. Nevertheless, the promises are still sure--what is sure is what Joseph Smith promised: “All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection, provided you continue faithful. By the vision of the Almighty God, I have seen it!” (Smith, 5:362) Let me repeat that . . . “All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection, provided you continue faithful. By the vision of the Almighty God, I have seen it!”
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, in his recent conference talk entitled “Motions of a Hidden Fire,” added that despite appearances, those unfulfilled prayers and those unrealized blessings are never overlooked by Heaven. With reference to he and his wife Pat’s struggle with covid, a struggle she did not survive, Elder Holland said,
“Brothers and sisters, I testify that God hears every prayer we offer and responds to each of them according to the path He has outlined for our perfection. I recognize that at roughly the same time so many were praying for the restoration of my health, an equal number—including me—were praying for the restoration of my wife’s health. I testify that both of those prayers were heard and answered by a divinely compassionate Heavenly Father, even if the prayers for Pat were not answered the way I asked. It is for reasons known only to God why prayers are answered differently than we hope—but I promise you they are heard and they are answered according to His unfailing love and cosmic timetable. If we “ask not amiss,” there are no limits to when, where, or about what we should pray.”
One thing we learn from understanding more about the dark miracles is how individual a test earth life is, and how foolish it is to judge a man’s life on how many miracles of light he enjoys. A man’s heart is often more known by how he faces the dark miracles than the miracles of light. I have never known a man with a bigger heart or greater faith than Brother Bob Pechin, who lived in my ward for many years. He was the biggest-hearted, most faithful man I have ever met. Bob endured the slow, cruel, relentless destruction of his body from brain cancer in his 50s, and was not healed, and he is now dead. But that takes away not one iota from his greatness; no, indeed, it adds all the more to it. When he was born back into the Savior’s presence through the dark miracle of death, did not our Christ embrace Bob close to his heart, and honor him, and call him “friend”? Some receive miracles of light, while others in very similar circumstances, equally righteous, receive the dark miracles. Who among us is wise enough to pronounce any judgment on God’s love and honor of either person? We must not be as the “friends” of Job, for they were rebuked by the Lord for their lack of insight on these matters.
This leads us finally to the question of how we are to meet the dark miracles. I think our first reaction should be to ask that the cup pass from us. That was Christ’s first inclination, and I think it proper that it be ours also. If the cup is not taken from us, then I think we do all in our power to stand against it and undo it, for who knows if we will prevail through our efforts. I think we pray and fast for a miracle of light, and then do everything in our own power to bring it forth. But even if we pray in faith and we stand in faith, and we work our hardest, a miracle of light may or may not be forthcoming. In D&C 38:16, we read, “Behold, verily, verily, I say unto you, that the people of Ohio call upon me in much faith, thinking I will stay my hand in judgment upon the nations, but I cannot deny my word.” Even the prayer of great faith cannot undo the word of God. We may even feel forsaken in the time before our first clear glimpse of the promised land, for that is how our Savior felt on the cross. But that feeling does not mean there is not a promised land. All the dark miracles must one day give place to all the miracles of light, for the light is our destiny. We have been promised this by God Almighty.
I want to leave you with the words that were found inscribed on a cellar wall in Cologne, Germany where, during World War II, Jews hid from the Nazis who sought their lives . . . These are words I have lived by in the darkest times of my life:
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining,
I believe in love even when not feeling it,
I believe in God even when He is silent. (quoted in Swensen, 2007:14)
May you be comforted by the Lord in all your dark times . . .
NOTES:
[1] Bennion, Francine R. (1988) “A Latter-day Saint Theology of Suffering,” in A Heritage of Faith: Talks Selected from the BYU Women’s Conferences, ed. Mary E. Stovall and Carol Cornwall Madsen (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988), 53–76. [Back to manuscript].
[2] Broderick, Carlfred (1989) “The Uses of Adversity,” in As Women of Faith, edited by M.E. Stovall and C.C. Madsen, SLC: Deseret Book, pp. 171-190. [Back to manuscript].
[3] Carter, Carla Cheney (2007) “Living by the Scriptures,” Church News, November 10th, p. 2. [Back to manuscript].
[4] Simmons, Dennis E. (2004) “But If Not . . . “, Liahona, May, pp. 73-75, accessed from lds.org, November 2007. [Back to manuscript].
[5] Smith, Joseph F., Jr. History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, edited by B.H. Roberts, 2d ed., revised, 7 volumes (SLC: Deseret Book, 1971), 5:362. [Back to manuscript].
[6] Swensen, Jason (2007) “LDS Senate Chief Lauds Public Service,” Church News, October 20th, p. 14. [Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Cassler, V.H. (2024) "Dark Miracles," SquareTwo, Vol. 17 No. 2 (Summer 2024), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCasslerDarkMiracles.html, accessed <give access date>.
Would you like to comment on this article? Thoughtful, faithful comments of at least 100 words are welcome.