Miracles

We sit on leather recliners in front of the fireplace and watch as the Olympic U.S. hockey team competes against Canada. Just the two of us, the house picked up, quiet. No babies cry. No diapers need to be changed. And no need to set an alarm for an early morning college class.

It’s nothing like February 22 forty-six years ago.

“You need some fun,” Steve’s uncle had said one evening. “Come get our black-and-white for the Olympics.”

So on the first day of the Olympics, which happened to be Valentine’s Day, Steve brought home his uncle’s fourteen-inch television and set it on the dresser in our bedroom. At first the picture was fuzzy. But Steve wrapped aluminum foil around the ends of the rabbit ears, and the reception improved.

We put the children to bed early, shook a pan across the gas burner on our stove until we had filled our large green Tupperware bowl with popped corn. And settled on our bed—really a four-inch foam mattress on a piece of plywood. With our backs against the wall, we celebrated Valentine’s Day by watching the XIII Olympic Winter Games.

Friday evening, the U.S. hockey team, full of amateurs and college students, played the Soviets, the favored team that had won four Olympic gold medals in a row.

I felt funny about how much I wanted the U.S. to win. This probably had to do with overhearing my dad, back when I was six, worrying about the Bay of Pigs, saying that the Russians could bring an end to the world as we knew it. It had to do with cowering under my desk during the bomb drills at Yoder School.

It had to do with stories I’d been told about Clayton Kratz, a Mennonite relief worker who disappeared in Soviet Russia while bringing relief to Russians who were starving because of World War I and famine. My great-uncle Alvin Miller had been sent to find him. My uncle was unsuccessful.

God loved the people of the U.S.S.R as much as he loved the people in the U.S.A, my dad often said. And so should we.

Still, as the home crowd waved flags and sang “God Bless America,” as the U.S. tied the game in the third period, and as the teams fought into the last minute, I wanted the U.S. hockey team to crush the U.S.S.R.

Sportscaster Al Michaels ended the game by screaming into the microphone, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”

We needed some miracles back then—more money for food, more hours in the day to write those papers and rock those babies, a clear path for getting through college as young parents.

But now, forty-six years later, silver-haired and having seen so much pain in the world, I want to believe in miracles even more. Big miracles, wrought of courage and kindness.