Friends: Where there is smoke, there is fire, and there is an awful lot of smoke – the unhealthy kind – in our current political and religious culture.  More fire for the truth of God and the gift of Christ will save us.

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Spirituality Column #1027

July 21, 2026

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

A World Without Miracles

By Bob Walters

“You are the God who performs miracles.” – Psalms 77:14

We arrived in smokey northern Michigan a few days ago hoping mother nature would give us a break and clear the air for our family vacation. Nowhere is pretty in these conditions, but in this glorious God-blessed area, we trust the sun will return.

Massive chunks of Ontario, Canada and even parts of northern Minnesota are enduring wildfires of great human, animal, and woodland disruption and destruction. Still, it seems unfair these fires have the audacity to dampen our arrival Up North.

We live in a blame-crazy world, whether the blame is rational or not. It’s easy in northern Michigan – actually the entire U.S. northern Midwest – to blame Canadian forest fires or Canadian forest management or, somehow, Canadians themselves for our momentary inconvenience. I’ve not entertained the need to blame Minnesota, but a dose of human compassion for the death and destruction there and farther north is a more humane attitude. These fires are nasty; pray for the victims, ask God for rain.

Here, we will be inconvenienced by a day or two of dangerous air quality but our lives won’t be ruined: thanking God for that.  Vacation will commence. I’ll pray for a miracle for the folks farther north, and not stoke my annoyance with misdirected blame.

Still, there must be someone or something to blame, right? Since blaming humans is disconcerting and requires retribution, I’d prefer the peace of blaming an entity I can’t hold responsible, like, say, Mother Nature. And that leads to a thought.

G.K. Chesterton in his 1908 classic, Orthodoxy, mentions Mother Nature while making a point about God’s identity. He notes nature is a creation of God, just like mankind is a creation of God. The lesson? God and Mother Nature are not the same.

Chesterton instead sees Mother Nature as a co-creation, a relative of humans. And not so much like a mother, but more like a “funny little sister.” As created beings we need to worship God and as Christians give grace to God’s creation, not blame it.

 The “Gaia, the Earth Mother” worshipping crowd, I think, gets it all wrong. Humanity causes as many or more problems for other humans as does “Mother Nature.” In that vein, I think “climate change” is a human dodge to shift an explanation in nature back onto blame for humanity, thereby creating guilt and thus a lever for some humans to control other humans. A real miracle would be humans living in peace.

So, here is my actual point. That peace – that miracle – is what we have in Jesus Christ.  A miracle of all miracles, the point of the Resurrection, is God proving His reality, presence, truth, and love by sending His son into humanity for our salvation: not just from our sins but from the cloaking darkness of our blameworthy fallenness. 

Jesus is God’s light and it is a miracle we can see Him, live with Him, and have faith have eternal hope with Him. Blame evaporates. What’s a bigger miracle than that?

Living in a world with God, knowing God, trusting God, loving God is a gift.  It is the glory of our humanity.  Any human, entity, or ideology seeking to destroy and denigrate that gift – that truth – is an enemy we must righteously resist. 

A life without God? A life without miracles? That’s the threat we truly face in our world, and it is not wildfire smoke.  It is the very real fire of Islam’s attempted destruction of our Christian culture and Communism’s leftist challenge to our free market republic.

I pray for the miracle of America addressing these threats and not losing our nature. If our nation disappears – and it could – we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) found this recent Marco Rubio Speech sobering.