So there's the man who had a faith in God for decades, but who only recently began to wonder if that God actually did things.  He's newly in a church that talks about answered prayers and even some not-infrequent noteworthy physical healings.  He's skeptical.

And then-inevitably?-it becomes relevant to him.  He badly injures his left arm and elbow on a Saturday.  Beyond being painful, he can't use the arm.  That Sunday, he hears a sermon about faith, which succeeds in stirring some fresh faith in him.  Then a stranger says it's his impression that God would especially like to heal someone's injured arm.  Specifically his left arm.  The man's wife jabs him in that same painful left arm, and he asks the stranger to pray for him.

And then he's exclaiming "Look at this!  Look at this!" to anyone who will listen, raising and lowering his left arm, flapping his elbow.

In the West, we have two fundamental divides about faith.  There's the one between faith and atheism-still heavily one-sided (ninety percent or more, in all surveys, choose faith) but with atheism gaining fast, at the very least on the New York Times bestseller list. 

And then, within the pro-faith camp, there's the divide between a God who does stuff and a God who, by and large, doesn't.

In other places where faith is booming-parts of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Korea, even pockets of China-this, by and large, wouldn't be open to discussion.  Of course God intervenes on our behalf!  It would be nonsensical to worship a so-called "God" who, sadly, couldn't or wouldn't actually do anything.

But here-again, even among some people who do believe in God-the thought of an intervening God can make us feel queasy.  We'd like to regard ourselves as educated people and it's hard to see how talking about anything that smacks of faith healing won't get us branded as yahoos.  I'm told that Francis Collins-director of the human genome project and author of the eloquent reconciliation between faith and science, The Language of God-nonetheless doesn't allow for a God who actually acts in our world.  So there's the academic objection.

Then there's the moral objection.  If this God can actually fix messed-up arms instantaneously, well, there are oceans of far worse suffering that don't get so neatly addressed.  And plenty of people do get prayer for their horrible condition with no improvement.  It seems pretty arbitrary.

And then there's the experiential objection.  At the very least, we might say, my prayers don't seem to have that effect.

Yet, inconveniently, there does seem to be an unremitting tide of impressive stories that, at the very least, I keep hearing.  There's the young woman who's suffered with fibromyalgia for fifteen years.  It's been so severe that her husband has to help her dress herself.  They want to have kids, but can't imagine how she could care for a child. 

She gets prayer and can't say she feels anything particular in the moment.  But the next morning there's no pain.  Or the next.  That was eight months ago and so far so good.  After fifteen years.

So how might we reconcile stories like this with such strong objections?  I wonder about this ancient idea usually called "the now and the not yet."  Jesus, for instance, said that God's kingdom was near just before all sorts of supernatural craziness busted out.  His point seemed to be that, in God's kingdom, no one will be sick or poor or discouraged or lonely or oppressed (spiritually, politically or otherwise).  And now people of faith are invited to get very real tastes of all those realities as, say, previews. 

And yet we're not in heaven yet, so none of these future realities are givens just yet, as much as they're often offered.  And so we have unrelieved suffering right next to astounding answered prayer.  Which would seem to encourage us to at least ask.

Whatever the cosmic truth, in the end I suppose all I know is what I see.  And that's that, along with the great majority of the non-Western world, I see a God who very much, well, does stuff.