We have a number of teacher vacancies we have been advertising for 2023. Up until last week we had received almost no applications and those that had come in did not look promising. This week, we have been interviewing for a number of these positions and all the candidates have been excellent teachers whose referees have sung their praises. In a period of high teacher shortages, this can only be described as a miracle. While we still have a few positions to fill, we are now confident we will fill all our vacancies with quality people.

Miracles are one of the contested ideas non-Christians have about the Christian faith. Depending on your world view, you may or may not believe in miracles. Christians, who believe that God created the world and everything in it, have little trouble believing that the Creator can speed up or over-ride the natural processes he has built into the universe and make unusual things happen. We believe that God ultimately orders all things so he can make things happen that we think not possible or have little hope for.

Those who do not believe in God rely on the natural processes of the world and find it impossible, or at least very difficult, to believe that those natural processes can be speeded up or over-ridden. But we live easily with many unusual occurrences such as coincidences and de ja vu moments that can’t really be explained by natural processes. We live with miracles constantly even if we do not always recognise them as such.

The greatest miracle of all is the opportunity God gives us to start life over and live it with Him so that we can deal with our old weak self and shape a new self, formed in his image, as we go forward. Christians believe all human beings are made in God’s image, but sin deforms us and it is only by this spiritual re-birthing process that we can be put right and his image recovered in us.

At GPCC, this is a message our students hear regularly and we are open to exploring this with you if this is not something you are familiar with. We live in a world that needs a few more miracles so we rejoice every time we experience one.