REB I really hope it brings you the answers you need and gives your comfort. I truly admire the balance religion gives some folks. Mind if I ask what your experience was that made you born again because I'm curious about something that I notice when "miracles" affect people profoundly.

Let me preface this by saying this (I don't want to ambush you with my train of thought if you allow me to know your experience): I don't believe in "miracles" or religious epiphanies for this simple reason. Generally things go into that category when the outcome of some event is tremendously pleasing to an individual or group like someone suddenly going into remission from cancer. The whole problem to me with categorizing that as a miracle is that it seems like the person completely discounts this huge number of events that are occurring at the same time that have horrible outcomes. When you put the number of seemingly remarkable events up against the full number of events that occur they simply don't seem any more than random. What makes them special to you is generally that you get tunnel vision to the single event.

I've had numerous close calls in my life where things could've gone completely wrong and it'd be easy if I only looked at those to think some guardian angel was looking out for me. To think that though, I'd have to believe that angel only controlled the good things and had no control over the bad stuff that's befallen me. That's a bit too convenient for logic. For every instance where it seems that something miraculous happened to some average Joe, there's way too many horrendous things that happen to very wonderful people.

Maybe your experience was beyond that random chance. I'm curious to know.

Art