Water from Wine and Miracles from Community

Many years ago I had the privilege of serving as a volunteer firefighter. One evening the fire department pager went off informing me of a house fire. I was home alone with my eight-year-old daughter so I could not respond immediately. I called a neighbor, and I all said was, "I'm home alone with Philippa and there's a house fire." "I'm there," were her only words and she hung up. As I pulled out of my driveway I saw my neighbor running for my house. I drove the second truck to the fire and, as is usual during the early minutes of fighting a fire, I was exceptionally busy. When the fire was out I had time to look around. The house was saved but heavily damaged. The woman who lived there was looking lost and confused. I can't even begin to tell you the sense of desolation I felt, that I felt every time, when I saw a family burned out of its home. "Here is where," I thought to myself, "we really could use a miracle right now." Here was want and need and shortage.

And then I looked closer. I was surrounded by, at this point, 3 different fire departments who had been called in to help. These women and men are all volunteers and had left their families and jobs to do what they could. I saw neighbors gathering up the children whose house had burned to bring them to secure beds and much love. I saw more neighbors coming to the aid of the woman who looked so desolate. I saw volunteer EMT's, who hadn't even been sent by dispatch, standing by to help in case anybody was hurt. I saw the caring and love and the eager compassion that makes community so remarkable. I remembered my own neighbor rushing over to my house. And I realized I was watching, watching, a miracle happen. I was watching abundance be born from lack, plenty breaking through shortage, water being turned into wine. When all we hear and read and see on the news day after day is of the bad that human beings can inflict upon one another, I watched the men and women of that community reach out to their own, and in the case of the fire fighters, literally put their own lives in danger to protect their neighbors. That part of us that is created in God's image, responded with a depth and compassion that transformed despair into hope. Only the presence of God can do that.

It was in this all-so-human episode that I realized I was catching a glimpse of what Jesus was doing in Cana: creating abundance out of shortage, building the bridges of love out of despair. This first miracle was indicative of all miracles: it came at time of need and shortage; it came to banish despair and reinstill hope in the human heart.