The extraordinary story behind a Vatican-recognized miracle raises a question many of us have probably never thought to ask.
For more than a decade, doctors, theologians and Vatican officials examined the medical records of a baby born in Rhode Island in 2007. They interviewed witnesses, scrutinized expert testimony and asked a question the Church never takes lightly: Had God worked a miracle?
Last year, the Vatican said yes. The baby's remarkable recovery after suffering severe oxygen deprivation at birth was formally recognized as the miracle attributed to the intercession of the Spanish priest Fr. Salvador Valera Parra, a miracle that actually cleared the way for his beatification.
This week, that same child — now 19 years old — is back in the headlines for a very different reason. Tyquan Johnson has been charged in connection with a shooting in Newport, Rhode Island, in which two men, aged 22 and 25, were wounded in the leg and calf. Police say the attack appears to have been targeted rather than random. Johnson was later arrested in Virginia and faces charges including felony assault with a firearm. He denies the allegations, which have yet to be tested in court.
It's difficult to read those two chapters of the same life without feeling a certain unease. We instinctively want them to fit together, as though a miracle should somehow shape everything that follows. If God intervened so dramatically at the beginning of this young man's life, shouldn't the story have unfolded differently?
The miracle is never the final chapter
That expectation is understandable. We like stories that tie themselves up neatly. We like beginnings that explain endings. Yet even the Gospels rarely oblige. They are full of people whose lives were transformed by extraordinary encounters with Christ, but the miracle was never the final chapter.
You might remember the 10 men living with leprosy who suddenly found themselves restored to health and able to return to the lives they had lost, yet only one thought to come back and thank Jesus. Peter spent three years watching Christ perform astonishing miracles, but, when confronted in the high priest's courtyard, fear got the better of him and he denied knowing his master. The miracles were real, but so too were the struggles that followed.
Perhaps we've been expecting miracles to do something they were never meant to do. When the Vatican investigates a miracle, it isn't trying to identify someone who will go on to live a flawless life. It is asking a much narrower question: Did something happen here that points beyond what medicine or science can explain? The answer says something about God's action in that moment. It doesn't remove the mystery of everything that comes afterwards.
That may be less comforting than we'd like. We'd often prefer miracles to function as guarantees, setting a life on an irreversible course towards happiness or holiness. Christianity offers something both more hopeful and more demanding. God acts, sometimes in ways that leave even the most experienced doctors searching for answers, but he never forces a response. Grace is given; freedom remains.
Perhaps that is why this story lingers in the mind. Not because it casts doubt on miracles, but because it reminds us that even the most extraordinary moments of grace don't spare us the ordinary work of choosing, day after day, what kind of people we want to become.
And this story reminds us that a miracle tells us something extraordinary about God's action in a particular moment, but it doesn't tell us how the rest of a person's life will unfold. That story remains in the hands of its Author, whose grace is never confined to a single chapter, but is present through every failure, every act of repentance, every unexpected turn, and every page still waiting to be written.
