Drowning In Miracles

The story usually starts with a man in a flood. The waters rise, he prays to God for help, and a series of rescuers arrive. First a car, then a boat, finally a helicopter. Each time he refuses, convinced that God will save him. He drowns. In heaven, he asks God why he wasn’t rescued. God replies, “I sent you a car, a boat, and a helicopter. What more did you want?”

This story is supposed to be clever. It’s supposed to teach discernment, to show that God provides in unexpected ways. But scratch the surface and what you really have is a theological hit piece on human suffering. The story blames the victim for failing to decode God’s secret signals. If you die poor, hungry, or drowned, it is not because help never came. It is because you didn’t recognize that the crumbs scattered your way were actually a feast prepared by the Almighty. The cruelty here is subtle. It shifts responsibility for suffering off both God and neighbor, and drops it squarely on the one already drowning.

There is another problem. Christians love to tell this story to prove that God works through people. God’s provision, they say, comes through human hands. But notice how quickly this collapses. The neighbor with the car is God’s instrument, the boatman is God’s servant, the helicopter pilot is God’s angel. Yet the Christian telling you this story rarely imagines themselves as the car, the boat, or the helicopter. They always see themselves as the narrator. This is theology as a shell game. God provides through humans, but never through me. Someone else will always be the rescuer. My responsibility has been outsourced to a faceless other.

To expose how absurd this logic is, consider a modern parable. A family is drowning, not in a flood, but in the economy. Rent goes up, wages stagnate, and the fridge is empty. They pray for provision. What arrives is not justice or systemic change, but random scraps. A gift card for groceries. A friend Venmoing fifty bucks. A one-time donation from a church pantry. Each time, they proclaim it a miracle. “God provided,” they say. And in a narrow sense, they are right. They ate that night.

But the big picture does not change. The rent is still too high. The children still hear their parents whispering about bills after bedtime. The anxiety still gnaws. And so the family develops a rhythm of survival, living not in peace but in countdowns. They tell themselves, “If we can just make it to Saturday, we’ll be ok.” Saturday is when the pantry opens. Saturday is when payday arrives. Saturday is when the relative who helps out is free. But Saturday always leads to another Saturday, and the relief is always temporary. Even the miracles arrive tethered to tragedy. Food comes with shame. Assistance comes with exhaustion. Hope comes with anxiety about how long it will last. The family survives, but at the cost of peace, stability, and dignity. They mistake survival for providence, and trauma for testimony.

This is not just a Christian problem. Atheists fall for the same illusion under a different name. We too cherry-pick the small wins and ignore the larger losses. We tell ourselves stories about luck, fortune, and hope. We clutch the occasional victory as if it erases the mountain of failure surrounding us. It is the gambler’s fallacy applied to existence. Celebrate the jackpot of one rent check, ignore the endless losses of Gaza, Congo, and the unhoused who sleep on sidewalks while entire apartment towers sit empty. The story of a providing God becomes weaker the more it is told. If provision means both presence and absence, then provision means nothing at all.

Meanwhile, the real world reminds us daily that the divine is silent. Wealth gaps widen while prosperity preachers with megachurches peddle false hope. Politicians pray on camera while cutting food assistance programs. Cities pat themselves on the back for building new shelters while luxury condos stand half-vacant. Genocide rages in Gaza and Congo while Western leaders tell us to trust in diplomacy, as if bodies piling up are just part of the “plan.” If God is providing, he has a disturbing taste for selective generosity.

The original flood parable, once inverted, is grotesque. Imagine if instead of pinning everything on divine timing, people simply organized. Imagine flood response teams, sandbagged neighborhoods, and better infrastructure. Imagine a story not about a fool who drowned waiting for a miracle, but a neighborhood that survived because no one waited. That would not preach well from a pulpit because it would not leave room for God to get the credit. It would only leave room for people.

This leads us to the final layer. Praxis and mutual aid are what provision actually looks like. Not luck. Not random scraps. Not the theological acrobatics of “God’s plan.” Real provision is deliberate, organized action. A community is not some magical entity that springs to life when the waters rise. A community is just people making the active decision to pull on the rope together. The illusion many fall into is thinking that because they cannot do it alone, it is hopeless. But if everyone waits for someone else to start pulling, the rope never moves. A community only exists because individuals refuse to let go of it.

And yet praxis alone is not enough. The rope must be tied to the right anchor. It is one thing to feed each other when governments fail, to house each other when landlords hoard, to heal each other when healthcare is a luxury. But unless the systems that create hunger, eviction, and untreated illness are dismantled, mutual aid becomes little more than crisis management. Praxis must be paired with transformation. Otherwise, we are pulling as hard as we can on a rope tied to the mast of a sinking ship.

So here is the moral. If God’s provision looks indistinguishable from human charity, then it is not God providing. It is people. If you keep waiting for miracles, you will drown. If you keep blaming victims for failing to see divine crumbs, you will excuse injustice. If you keep telling yourself that someone else will always be the boat, you will never build one.

The story needs to be rewritten. We do not wait for boats. We build them. We do not pray for provision. We provide. We do not celebrate crumbs while others starve. We organize the feast. Together. And when the rope is there, we all pull, because there is no God on the other end of it. There is only us.