A witness to miracles

Each of us are a witness to miracles. Of course, even miracles require a certain amount of faith even when we see them first hand. I can only imagine that even as Lazarus walked out of his tomb with embalming cloth trailing from his body that there must have been someone there who thought to themselves, "Wow, he really wasn't dead after all". But we choose our miracles with the power of our faith in Him who calls us to see them with a child's eyes.

The most powerful personal miracle I witnessed happened a few years ago when my Mother in law lay on the last bed she would ever rest in. She had lived a very painful, and to some extent humiliating existence for the better part of 20 years after she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the age of 42.
She was a proud and strong mother of seven; Almost stereotypically German by heritage and was Catholic to the core. She had a very strong devotion to Mary and was rarely without her rosary or green scapular. She was not without her faults but one of the things that impressed me in hindsight was that her faults weren't concealed. They were just out there for the world to see.

Side note: There is nothing worse than the church going scout leader that turns out to be a serial killer with everyone standing around saying, "We had no idea!!?"

Not my Mother in law. She was stubborn to the point of being dangerous (she took up driving only after she contracted Parkinson's and insisted on driving herself around despite numerous fender benders). She was a fierce mama bear when it came to her kids, even when they didn't deserve it.
Thus it was very difficult to see this proud woman reduced to a shaking, shuffling, quivering, shadow of herself who would often move about on her hands and knees as she resisted the walker and wheelchair. I'm ashamed to say that it was particularly difficult for me, what with me being the weak kneed sissy that I am when it comes to others suffering.
In her last days we visited at the hospital as the unbearable became inevitable. It was a long suffering death as vital organs each gave up the fight on some unknown timetable. Her family stayed with her and prayed with her for as long as she could speak and when that stopped they prayed over her instead. One day my wife told me that her mother had had a battle with Satan earlier that morning, before I had arrived after work. Her mother had pointed to the foot of the bed and had described Satan standing there, mocking her, urging her to give in and speaking all sorts of vile things. My wife said her mother was visibly shaken by what she saw and there was no doubt she was truly experiencing this. Now the skeptic will tell you that it is not entirely unusual for patients in the last throws of life to begin to hallucinate. And of course the fiercely religious will likely experience the demons and angels of their particular brand of theology. I am inclined to believe this particular incident actually occurred, not because I have the faith to believe in miracles, but because of something that happened later that week.
It helps to know that we had been visiting her at the hospital off and on for more than a couple of weeks and as is in standing with the typical hospital environment there was some piped in music playing soft and low in the room. We had been hearing this music every day for the whole of her stay there and it never wavered. It was a very generic, entirely instrumental, new age, easy listening tripe that would be found on a CD labeled "Natures Echos" or some other such title. I had, for the most part, already managed to filter it out entirely as I went about doing the normal hospital visitor type of things like reading every scrap of paper that happened to be laying about in the room or the hallway. It was later in the evening a few days after the Satan incident as I sat in the hall outside her room reading yet another magazine. My wife was in the room with her mother and few other family members and they all knew they were very close to spending their last hours in the hospital. The management at the generic nature music channel apparently decided that, for at least one song, they would change their musical style and a very beautiful mezzo-soprano voice came over the speaker singing the "Ave Maria". Even sitting in the hall I noticed the change immediately and stood up and moved toward the door to see if someone had turned on a personal radio. As I saw the look on the faces of my wife and her family I knew that they were thinking the same thing that I was thinking.

"Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."

In my mind the miracle was unmistakable. A tear streaked down the face of my Mother in law who had been mostly comatose the entire day and we knew that she too had heard the call of Mary. She died within the hour and the nature music channel resumed it's normal programming.