Seriously, the Bible is the Word of God?

When someone comes to me and tells me that the Bible answers all his questions, I usually react with a squint. My first thought is, “Have you studied it?”

Of course, some have studied it. They have read the Bible in-depth. But most times, those who did will be less forthcoming with telling me that they have found all the answers they have been looking for. 

Sometimes, when I read the Bible, I have more questions than answers. Maybe, Psalm puts it best when describing my thoughts on some issues that still challenge me today. Some of these issues include His second coming, the Old Testament God of violence, homosexuality, Paul’s treatment of women, suffering and divine providence, slavery and the Bible’s inerrancy and infallibility. 

Psalm 119 reads: “Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path.” 

I always see that scripture as offering understanding one step at a time, that is, the immediate next step after and no more, and definitely not a floodlight cast on the whole journey to full understanding. 

I guess that is why Paul said that he only sees the glass half full this side of heaven, at least not until the perfect comes. 

N.T. Wright said that the unexamined Bible is not worth reading and I agree with him. 

Different people read it for different reasons. Some are genuine seekers of the truth. Others exploit the scriptures to further their dogmatic beliefs. 

Their motive is important because through the lens of their own biasness, the scripture taken selectively (and out of context) has often been used as a means to their ends.

The history of the church from the time of the first stone laid to the time we have verses splashed on huge pixelated screens has made the Bible what they want it to be to serve their own agenda. 

We have jumped from one doctrinal extreme to the other, from one denomination to another, from uncompromising poverty vows to compromising prosperity gospel, from self-flagellating Mosaic laws to self-indulging libertine grace, and from demanding that the Bible be taken as a science book explaining how the earth was created sometimes in 4004 BC to divining its scriptures for revelationary knowledge to wow the credulous crowd.   

Bishop Yvette Flunder wrote: -

“We’ve taken 2,000 years to turn Jesus into someone very different than the person who got in the water with John for baptism. There’s the political stuff, there’s economic stuff, there’s church stuff. Jesus is even a plank on many political platforms. Jesus is the reason that we go to war, Jesus is the reason we oppose the immigrants, Jesus is even mad at Mickey Mouse or the Teletubbies. But there comes a point when we have to undress Jesus, we have to take all the stuff, all the crap that we’ve put on Jesus, all of these layers and layers of tradition and all of our different ideas and theologies and get back to the Jesus that stood in the water with John.”

So, let’s examine the Bible starting with 2 Timothy 3:16-17. We ought to be familiar with it. 

“All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equip for every good work.”

While I don’t dispute on the teaching, reproofing, correction and training part towards righteousness and good works, I however have some reservation on how many have used this verse to support their claim that the Bible, that is, everything in it, every statement, every incident recorded and every paragraph written, is perfect, inerrant and infallible.

This is where the call of NT Wright to examine the Bible comes in hot and much needed. And the question we have to ask ourselves is this, have we turn the Bible into the fourth member of the Trinity?Isn’t that a form of bibliolatry?

And if in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word became flesh and lived among us bearing witness, is the Word that John was referring to the Bible in print or the living Christ? 

One Hebrew scripture scholar Harrell Beck said: “The Bible is not the Word of God - but the Word of God is in the Bible.” 

Some will view this statement as outrageous or blasphemous, but if you read the Bible, some aspects of it, you will realise that what is written, or the act done as recorded, just do not quite square with what Jesus as the Word enfleshed have taught, encouraged or lived for. 

Ultimately, I take my cue from what He said in one encounter when a lawyer asked him, which is the greatest commandment in the law. Jesus replied: -

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind...And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

And if that is the timeless foundation upon which the whole Bible rests, then some parts of it seem to me to be the proverbial apples that fell far from the tree where love was hung.

Let’s start with the most controversial subject of all. The “apple“ that is homosexuality. 

We know Jesus said nothing about it. He talked about sexual immorality, religious hypocrisy, the corruption of money, the heart of deceit and lies, and the crucifixion of self. But, Jesus was quiet about homosexuality and masturbation. 

Of course, Jesus was quiet about other things too but that is not a backdoor to their implied permissiveness.

My point is not to debate about homosexuality here, for we don’t lack verses that condemn it. Many have however come forward to argue that those verses have to be seen in their proper context, both cultural and theological, where the prohibition was specifically aimed at gang rape, temple prostitution, idolatry and pederasty. Well, I am not going to argue with it here. 

Yet, if you take those same-sex condemnations literally, it would have to mean the death penalty for the violators - no questions asked.

In fact, since we are on the inerrancy and infallibility of scriptures, some of the death penalties meted out in the law of Moses included persistent rebelliousness of a child (Deut 21:18-21), a child who curses his/her parent (Exodus 21:15 and 17), caught working on Sabbath (Exodus 35:2), adultery (Leviticus 20:10), fornication (Deut 22:13-21), and yes, homosexuality (Leviticus 20:13).

I know what you are thinking: “But mike, they are the old covenant. Jesus came to fulfill the law. We are no longer under the curse of the law. We are set free by his grace, love and mercy.” 

You are right. I agree. 

But unless you are an avowed follower of Marcionism, who considered the OT God as a jealous tribal god (“Demiurge”), that is, a lesser deity than the Heavenly Father of Jesus in the NT, you will be hard-pressed to keep those death penalties (from the OT) separate from the commandment of love and Jesus’ sacrifice at Calvary (from the NT). 

This ain’t no cherry picking between the OT and NT. You pick up one end of the NT stick, you also pick up the other OT end. In other words, the God of the OT is deemed as the same as the God of the NT – they are one person.

And that is not all. Let’s talk about God’s wrath in the OT.

In Exodus 32:27, Moses said to the sons of Levi: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, “Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.” The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day.””

So much for loving your neighbour right? And unless you accept that God does what He pleases and His sovereignty is unimpeachable, a command to massacre is just hard to swallow. 

There are also other passages of the OT where David, Moses and Joshua were asked to kill in God’s name. I guess however you want to explain it, this apple (of divine-sanctioned genocide in the OT) fell rather miles away from the tree of life (from the NT). 

Indeed, there are other parts of the Bible that mentioned strange sex acts of the chosen people and one even led to death. That’s poor Onan who spilled his semen in a levirate marriage against his will and ended up being slayed by God. 

But, alas, I’ll skip that and talk about the one verse that has always troubled me. It is in Genesis 6. 

In verse 11, it says that “the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.” And the author of the next part seems to have read the mind of God when he wrote: “And the Lord was sorrythat he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieves him to his heart.” In some version, it reads: “(God’s) heart was filled with pain.” (And another version reads “the Lord regretted”).

I know I should not take that divine apology (or remorse) literally, but my point is that it appears to me that it was written from a human perspective, interpreted through a human understanding of and response to circumstances happening at that time, and in making that presupposition, I find it difficult to take everything stated in the Bible as an expression and measure of perfection and infallibility. 

Theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote, “The Bible is an act of faithful imagination. It is not a package of certitudes. It is an act of imagination that invites our faithful imagination that makes it possible to live faithfully.” And excessive certitude runs the danger of replacing the earnest search for truth with settling for easy and convenient answers. 

Put it another way, the Bible is not meant to answer all your questions with certainty. It is not a science book the same way your JC physics or chemistry text is. It is not as if one of the Ten Commandments contained this scientific hint: “Two intertwining strands encode the secret of life” (and if the Bible is inerrant as a science book, wouldn’t it get that right, or foresee that in advance?).

Last but not least, here’s how the Bible treats women. 

In the eye of the law, a woman is worth half of what a man is worth. A menstruating woman is considered ceremonially unclean. They are deemed as chattels of their husband. And in Judges 19, there is a story of a man who gave away his virgin daughters away to be gang-raped in place of offering the male strangers who were guests in his house. There are more of these stories, but you get the drift about claims of Bible’s inerrancy. 

After this short tour around the estate looking for strayed apples, I am again going back to the two commandments that all the law and the prophets hung upon. 

If that is the perfect benchmark, that is, the timeless inerrant and infallible Word enfleshed that Jesus duly fulfilled via his life and death and resurrection, then those parts of the Bible I have mentioned above (eg. the death penalty, coitus-failed slaying, divine genocide, the divine apology, and the treatment of women, just to name a few), ought to give us discerning believers cause for some serious thought about what Professor Beck said, which I shall repeat here: “The Bible is not the Word of God - but the Word of God is in the Bible.”

I will leave that part of personal reflection to you. But, to aid you along, this comment by author and pastor Adam Hamilton may be helpful: -

“We often think of the Bible as a supernatural book whose authors were inspired in a way and to a degree that ordinary Christians are not inspired...Yet the biblical authors, with a handful of exceptions, do not claim extraordinary inspiration...Even apostles did not read the Bible from the perspective of “God (or the Bible) says it, I believe it, that settles it.” They are willing to debate how their Bible applied to new situations. They recognized that parts of the Bible needed to be reinterpreted. They concluded that some things which had been very important within Judaism did not express God’s timeless will for humanity. Whatever view of the inspiration of scripture they held, it allowed such conclusions.””

Let me end with a helpful metaphor offered by another theologian, Frederick Buechner. He illustrates how we can hold on to our belief notwithstanding that the Bible contains certain passages that make us cringe, even in disbelief. 

He compared the Bible to a window. “He notes that when we look through a window, we don’t worship the window. We simply look through it to get a glimpse of the Divine on the other side. Just because there are smudges, swatted flies, and hairline cracks obstructing our view, we don’t throw the window out. We learn to distinguish between what is part of the window and what is beyond it...Although a flawed and imperfect window, it was fashioned by people of faith who have helped generations of seekers catch a glimpse of the mystery beyond.” 

(David M. Felton and Jeff Procter-Murphy, “Living the Question - the Wisdom of Progressive Christianity”). 

Postscript: -

Last night, my wife and I had a discussion about this topic:Is the Bible truly inerrant and infallible? 

She asked me, have I thought for a moment to see the whole tapestry of the Word of God and not just the back of it? 

You see, if you turn to examine the back of the tapestry, it is indeed ugly. The back is a mess. The different coloured threads crisscrossing each other with no apparent purpose, random chaos, but when you turn it around, the front reveals a full and complete picture. Without the mess behind, you can’t achieve the beauty in front. 

What the back lacks in order, meaning and direction (like the many inexplicable parts of the Bible, esp. the OT), the front makes it up with order, meaning and direction (that is, all the seemingly chaotic events leading up to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus). 

So, that kept me thinking of how the Bible can still be inerrant and infallible in the way a tapestry is beautiful and complete on one side, but messy on the other side. Yet, it is not the back that completes the tapestry but the front. The back is just a means to the end in front. 

Ultimately, our redemption story is a messy story, as it narrates the fall, the blood sacrifices, the disobedience, the endless rebellion and the final atonement. We are still struggling with it, even today. 

But all that doesn’t change the core message of the Bible, that is, it is about the Word that became flesh and lived among us, transforming us, towards hope and love. The mess is thus necessary to bring about order, the fall is a prelude to the Cross, and death to self is a journey to the eternal hope that awaits. 

Maybe that is one way of looking at the inerrancy/infallibility of the Bible; not so much in the construction of it by fallible human agents, but its redemption objective that came to pass in a man who became the final sacrifice and won the ultimate victory. 

Phey Yew Kok - a man on the run, a man on the mend.

MLK once said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. This is true of most lives that I know and read about. 

Take former NTUC chairman and MP Phey Yew Kok for example, he is at last a free man. He has paid his debt or sins to society. Once a fugitive, prisoner of conscience, now he is a former inmate, a person at liberty to live his life by his own will and choices. 

Mr Phey spent 36 years on the run overseas because of an act he did in December 1979 as the appointed NTUC president and chairman. It reports that “he was accused of misappropriating more than $200,000.00 in supermarket goods and taking money from the International Metalworkers Federation and Boon Teck Education Centre.”

He was out on bail then, and was expected to return to court on January 7, 1980. “But on New Year’s Eve, he took a train to Kuala Lumpur and went to Bangkok, evading attempts to track him down.”

For 36 years, he remained a wanted man in Bangkok, and when asked about his life in Thailand, he could only reveal that he had to work to “earn (his) living to survive.”

You must be wondering, why bother to return then? Why not stay where he was for the reminder of his days? 

At 80 plus, how many years are you left with anyway when you have already spent 36 years adapting to a life that takes into account all the misdeeds you have done in the past? Why not die a fugitive instead of returning to the shame you have left behind? 

Well, when asked why Mr Phey surrendered himself in 2015, being a man of few words, he said: “I knew that I was wrong and at the right time, I decided to come back.”

With that terse revelation, Mr Phey was kept in custody since June 23, 2015, while he waited for his “60 months’ sentence for criminal breach of trust, abetting the fabrication of evidence and intentionally omitting to appear before a court.”

For good behaviour, Mr Phey was allowed to spend the final year of his sentence in home detention. Mr Phey said: “I must apologise and accept what I did was wrong.”

Lesson? Well, I have just two.

The first is what he had said earlier - “I knew that I was wrong and at the right time, I decided to come back.”

It appears to me that there is a gap between knowing that one is wrong and waiting for the right time to face the music. Knowledge is one thing, resolution is another. 

Alas, it took 36 long years for him to come to terms with what he had done. The circumstances that filled the 36 years are too murky (or complex) for tracing or dissecting (for what’s the point, right?), but it is safe to say that Mr Phey never forgotten what had done. His past still haunted him. 

For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in good or bad health, with a stained or broken conscience, his struggles within himself very much coloured all his work in Thailand to earn a living to survive. 

This reminds me of a saying that you do not drown by falling into the water. You drown by staying in it. 

Mr Phey’s life was not over because of a mistake or wrong he had committed about 40 years ago. In fact, if he had surrendered himself in 1980, he didn’t need to live his life as a fugitive for the next 36 years. 

So, he was free only to the extent that he was not externally bound. But within himself, he could not run away from the prison bars of his conscience. It presumably casts a looming shadow on whatever that he did in the 36 years. 

You can say that by falling into the water, you still can get out of it by paying for your wrongdoings. But you can also choose otherwise and stay in the water for years struggling with that drowning sensation until you pull yourself out of it. 

That was what Mr Phey did, eventually. But like he said, there was a right time for that. For Mr Phey, that right time took him 36 years. 

Alas, it bears repeating that knowledge must thus come with a personal resolution to want to change. Or else, what you know, the projection of that knowledge to ”wow“ the crowd, is all just but a show - a magic show to an audience of one, that is, your deluded self. 

And the second lesson is in his plea for a second chance. Mr Phey said that “he was sorry for what he had done and hoped he would be given a second chance.” 

He added that “second chance means that if I am still physically and mentally strong and fit, I will be allowed to do what I can do. I am a trade unionist.”

We all cry out for second chances. Some of us cry for more because life has a way to test us until we come to a point or crossroad where we can distinguish clearly between what is conviction and what is pretension. 

Somehow, life has its own way to punish a soul for pretension. But it liberates the same soul for conviction. 

It reports that when the electronic tag was removed from him on Tuesday, signifying that his sentence had formally come to an end, Mr Phey felt the lightness of being because he said he didn’t feel “the stress of rushing home to comply with the terms of his detention.”

Mr Phey also acknowledged that he “feels and looks healthy”. He said with a smile: “In my first press picture after my return, I looked haggard, like a sick old man.” 

I guess there are always two kinds of freedom that we fight for (or struggle with), and the external one, the bars outside of us, will not give us the enduring peace we need to flourish (and not just surviving) as compared to the one that sets us free from within. 

So, the arc of the moral universe is indeed long; and for some of us, it may take longer to come back full circle. 

But having said that, let me add that the arc not only bends towards justice, it also bends towards redemption. It is the redemption of a truly transformed life. And no riches, fame and power can do that except a heart that surrenders to the conviction of what is right, what is true and what is unqualified repentance.

And I guess the only thing Mr Phey is rushing home to now is to a clear, restored and free conscience. Cheerz.

Daughter of Hour Glass founders jailed.

This would make big news, “Daughter of Hour Glass founders jailed.”

Yes, the tongues are wagging. Isn’t she well off? Isn’t she educated? Didn’t she have everything she ever wanted? What happened? 

Even the Judge commented: “Despite the accused’s background, the case is completely ordinary, in terms of the type of conviction, the reasons for consumption and the accidents that occurred.”

The key words are “Despite the accused’s background.” That stood out because she was supposed to be different, a cut above the rest for having a good padded start (or foundation) in life. 

Well, there is always two perspectives to see the case. The first is the way the law sees it and the second is the way Audrey Tan May Li, 45, sees it.

The law sees it as a commission, an admission and an incarceration (for rehabilitation). 

Here’s the commission. Audrey, a former public relation consultant, drove without due care and attention when under the influence of the drug ketamine, and knocked over a traffic light. That was in August 2015. 

While on bail, Audrey “reoffended in October last year when she turned up intoxicated for a psychiatrist assessment at the Institute of Mental Health.”

Here’s the admission. Audrey pleaded guilty to three drug charges and the driving charge on 27 August. 

And here’s the incarceration part. The court sentenced her to 22 months jailed for “repeatedly abusing drugs over two years” when her lawyer Eugene Thuraisingam pleaded for probation. 

The district judge said that “her ability to make conscious choices is not impaired.” Well, that much is true from a legal standpoint. 

Now comes the other perspective from Audrey’s life. 

In her defence, Audrey said that the substance abuse was a form of “self medication to escape from the stresses of her life.”

In my view, it would be more appropriate to call them a trail of brokenness that she had to trudge through (instead of “stresses of her life”). Here’s why. 

First, her parents’ divorce was traumatic for her. It was the breakup that made news because their marriage lasted for decades and they were the founder of the highly successful luxury watch retailer, The Hour Glass.

Audrey’s mum, Jannie Chan, 73, also faced a possible jail term (pending appeal) for contempt of court. Her father, Dr Henry Tay, 73, is struggling to move on with a new love of his life. 

But that’s not all for Audrey. Her own marriage also ended in divorce. She has three children from that marriage, and according to the court papers, “her elder daughter (was) taken from her in 2014 by her former husband.”

It reports that Audrey suffered ”from overwhelming pain and despair from her elder daughter rejecting her.”

For the above reasons, Audrey “developed psychiatric issues and was later found to be suffering from adjustment disorder with depressed mood and anxiety, and from substance abuse disorder.”

Her lawyer said, “These circumstances exacerbated her mood...and led her to recklessly take the substance.”

Lesson? That’s the two perspectives of seeing the case: through the eye of the law and through Audrey’s eye.

The law has a certain standard. It is often strict, some even seemingly arbitrarily fixed. For example, if you exceed a certain weight for drug possession for purpose of trafficking or your alcohol level exceeds the legal limit, you face either death or life’s imprisonment, or a possible jail term with disqualification. 

Even for age, your life can take a drastic turn if you commit an offence. 

If the victim is below a certain age, your offending act will warrant a heavier sentence. If you as the offender commits the offence at a certain age, you may be denied more rehabilitative forms of sentences like probation, reformatory training or community based sentences. 

So, when you breached that threshold, or fall short of that mark, whether it is weight, alcohol level or age, you have to face the music and serve the time. 

But when you see it from Audrey’s perspective, things are often less clear. 

The brokenness she has to struggle through (of experiencing her parents’ divorce and her own and her daughter’s rejection) comes in as compassionate grounds in mitigation of her action, but they do not alter the legal position that “her ability to make conscious choices is not impaired.” 

Often justice’s hands are tied because the social contract to govern a society depends on maintaining law and order in return for the citizenry’s trust and compliance, and justice is - proverbially speaking - blind to all the subjective nuances of an individual’s pain and struggles that seem to justify one’s action to some extent, but does not satisfy that legal threshold of an unimpaired free will. 

Alas, I truly wish Audrey well in this most unfortunate crossroad of her life. I pray for her recovery and resilience, and for an enduring hope bigger than her own pain and sorrows. 

It is said that the swift wind of compromise is more devastating that the sudden jolt of misfortune. While wind caresses and lulls you, a jolt wakes you up. 

Most times, we escape from what we need to confront because we cannot imagine or bear the pain that such misfortune may bring. But escapism invariably brings even more pain over time. 

And it is only when we tell ourselves it has to stop, and stop right here that we bring about enduring change. This resolve (or teacher) comes in many forms, and one of it is unfortunately (or fortunately) misfortune - depending on one’s perspective. Cheerz.

Redemption road : Anthony Ler, inmate Z, and Allan Ong.

Mrs Dorcas Lee's son, whom the papers named as "Z", killed a woman in 2001, and he was only 14 then. 

The victim was Annie Leong and the case captured the imagination of the nation. 

The court records showed that Z was manipulated and instigated by Annie's estranged husband, Anthony Ler. 

Ler even went to the extent of threatening to hurt Z's family if he did not do his bidding. 

Ler's masterminded the murder so that he could retain the HDB flat and have custody of his daughter, who was only 4 then. 

Convicted of murder, Ler was hanged in 2002. 

Z has been paying the price for what he had done ever since and is currently being detained at The President's Pleasure ("TPP"). He should be in his early thirties today. 

Lesson? One. It is about the bond between Z and his mother. It is a story that has to be told (thanks to journalists KC Vijayan and Tan Shu Yan).

His mother never gave up on her son. 

When she first heard of the news, Mrs Lee (who has two other children) recalled: "I was stunned and shocked then. I lost my voice. He had caused the death and I was going to lose him."

She said the killing was committed a day after Mother's day. "Celebrating that day is not for me any more. Every Mother's day I feel terrible," she said. 

What shocked Mrs Lee was that her son was a gentle and kind person. She said that "he brought back a cat which followed him to the house, brought back a sick bird to nurse till well and then released it. When his hamster died, he cried a few days." 

Mrs Lee recalled that even in prison, Z never forgotten his friends' birthdays. Without fail, he would ask her to buy birthday cards and send them to his friends on his behalf. 

What touched Mrs Lee deeply was this incident as recounted by her:-

"One time I was surprised when someone suddenly knocked on my flat door with a birthday cake. It was for me and he had somehow arranged with an ex-inmate to come to my house and present it to me." 

But Z did not give up on her and life either. For the past 16 years, Mrs Lee has been encouraging him, urging him to strive for the best. 

It reports that "he topped his O-level class in the prison school and went to enrol for a degree course through self-study, seeking to major in English and Business Studies."

During this period, Mrs Lee had to "travel back and forth from prison to the university campus office to get his assignments and exams graded, returning with more materials."

All this time, Mrs Lee has been supporting Z, believing in him, and always assuring him that she is proud of what he has achieved behind bars. 

She said her faith has kept her going and is hoping for a Presidential pardon, which her (pro bono) lawyer, Peter Ong, had submitted to the President. 

The petition is still pending.

One of Z's inmate, Allan Ong, who received the pardon (for gang-related killing) and was released in 2012, told Z this:-

"(He) understands the feeling, sometimes waking up suddenly in the middle of sleep, wondering how long before going out. There is nothing to look forward to."

Allan himself had studied two-year specialist diploma course in precision engineering after he came out. 

He said: "Now I am married and have a stable job to support my family. I got the keys to my Build-to-Order flat in 2016 and attend regular worship at the New Creation Church. I deeply appreciate the chance given by then President Tony Tan and cherish the opportunity to start life afresh."

About Z, Allan said: "He is always trying his best to be the best, to show others he has changed. He is very hopeful that miracles will happen."

The above story literally writes itself. And in my book, miracles come in many disguised ways that I have at times taken them for granted. 

Life's miracles is in the simplest things, or acts. 

While most are looking for that big break, that grand reception, or that financial windfall, in a life that is brief, the miracle I learn from Z, his mother, my friend Peter Ong, and Allan is in a contrite heart, an undying love, a generous spirit and a trusted friendship. 

You don't need much to embrace life and the miracles that it offers to you when you are walking through the valley of your own trials. 

While I can never imagine the torment and pain that Z and his mother have to go through, that is, the freedom denied, the sleepless nights and the fear and uncertainty, I can nevertheless be deeply inspired by their love for each other, their fight to stay strong for each other, and their ceaseless cherishing of every little opportunity they have to move forward together. 

I always believe that miracles are transforming, and they transform you from deep within. Anything that doesn't is not a miracle, it is life's misfortune. 

Here's what I mean. 

If you should come to certain material wealth but along the way, you lose your integrity, your loved ones, that's a misfortune. If you should come to certain fame, but in the process ends up compromising your virtues, that's a misfortune. 

And if you should gain titles, knowledge and accolades, but you achieve them through means that erode your character, through dishonesty, that's a misfortune. 

But a miracle is different for it makes the enduring difference. It doesn't depend on circumstances, it is about inward transformation. 

You progress with miracles, but you regress with misfortune. And you grow as you take nothing for granted but you come to ruin when you take everything for granted. 

So, I am better off by the story of Z and his mother, and the many people who have made a difference in their lives. 

Like Z (and his mother), I am looking forward to a miracle in his life, a miracle of a future of hope, transformation, and most importantly, overcoming love. 

For the greatest story ever told is often not about who made it to the Forbes's list or Hollywood Walk of Fame, or who walked down the coveted red carpet, but it is about a life transformed, and how he or she has transformed others. 

That is what makes the natural supernatural for me. Cheerz.