When I turned twelve, I think it was, I got a new waterproof digital watch for my birthday. One hot summer afternoon not long after that, Mark pushed an inner tube out away from the dock for me to dive through. As I dived through the tube, the valve stem caught my watch and ripped it off my wrist. My heart sank; I swam back to the dock and told Mark what had happened. I then started diving to the bottom of the pond, which was more than eight feet deep at the end of the dock, running my hands through the mud, trying to find that watch.

After diving several times with no luck, I was exhausted, frustrated, and ready to give up and go back to the house. Mark, being a good little Pentecostal boy, suggested that we pray. I didn’t feel like it, but being a good Pentecostal big brother, I agreed. Mark prayed a very simple prayer: “Dear God, please help us find Paul’s watch. In the name of Jesus, amen.” He raised up his little head and looked me right in the face, grinning, with his eyes sparkling as if it were Christmas morning. He suggested that he swim back out with the inner tube and put it in the exact same spot for me to dive through again. Doubting that this would work or that we’d ever find the watch, I nevertheless directed him from the dock—a bit farther out, a bit to the right—until he had placed the inner tube perfectly. I backed up, ran down the dock, dived through the inner tube, and then swam to the bottom of the pond with my eyes squeezed shut and my hands spread wide open until they hit the cold squishy mud. My right palm landed directly on my watch; I didn’t even have to move my hand around to find it. I grasped it tightly and swam back to the surface, hardly believing what had just happened. Mark and I ran back to the house and talked all over each other telling our mom.

That story has become a little legend in our family. But legend though it may be, it’s not an odd or unbelievable event in the lives of Pentecostals. Like Mark, most Pentecostals expect things like this to happen and love to tell stories about the miracles and healings. Just this past Christmas, I told the tale of my lost-and-found watch to my in-laws in Texas while we were all sitting around the dinner table eating stew and cornbread. Ronda, my sister-in-law, immediately said, “Remember the bone spur on my knee that disappeared?” and Betty, my mother-in-law, interjected, “And don’t forget the burns on Deborah’s leg that were healed.” Grandma then told about the time that Grandpa laid his hands on their van and prayed for it one morning—which was the morning they were almost killed by an out-of-control eighteen-wheeler “with smoke boiling everywhere” that “screeched within two feet of the back of our van.” When asked why he had prayed that morning, Grandpa replied, “I just felt impressed to do it. Never done it before and never done it since.” Betty then told us about when her uncle had a spider bite so bad that he swelled up and was going to die. There was no doctor, so his father prayed for the boy, who was healed immediately.

Everybody chimed in with one story after another until Grandpa interrupted, “I’m going to tell one even more impressive than that,” and went on to recount an amazing tale about when Sister Foster had called him to come quickly because Gladys, with the death rattle in her throat, had been sent home to die by the doctors. Her husband, whom Grandpa called “a big ol’ Methodist,” was standing by the door “to see what we were going to do to his wife.” Grandma and Grandpa prayed for her, and a couple of days later, she was perfectly fine and lived for many years after that.

Grandpa then told about how, when he was stricken with appendicitis as a twelve-year-old boy, he looked at a clock on the wall and thought, “The man who made that clock could fix it if it broke. And God could fix me, too.” The pain left him that very instant, and he just swung his feet off the bed and got up and strolled out onto the porch. His father walked up from fetching the doctor, leaned against a post, and, said Grandpa, “his eyes got yay big, and he said, ‘Son, what’s happened to you?’ I told him about the clock and how the pain left me. He expected me to get sicker and sicker; he just knew I was going to die. But I was playing with the other boys from then on, and I’ve never had another pain on that side.”

Over the next hour, almost everyone at the table told at least one story. We heard tales of healings and miracles that included asthma cured, a cancer that fell off a man’s hand, infected tonsils being spit out on the ground by a boy after he was prayed for, and the woman whose infected bladder healed (“She still writes to us fifty-five years later,” Grandma said with a nod of her head). There was the woman in Anniston, Alabama, who had emphysema; Brother Cobb in Bonham, Texas, who also had emphysema (and who slept in a bed for the first time in fifteen years after being prayed for and healed); the woman with unceasing pain that had lasted for years (who heard a radio preacher say, “Go to the nearest Assembly of God church and get the pastor to pray for you”); the two-year-old girl who didn’t pray quite right (“Thank you Jesus for mommy’s headache”) but her mother’s headache was healed anyway; and even a healing from “we don’t know what it was.”

During a pause in our merry recounting of miracle upon miracle, I mentioned that in my book I would also need to address the fact that sometimes people aren’t healed, that sometimes miracles don’t happen when we pray. At my words, silence fell; I could hear the clock ticking in the living room. I took a bite of my stew, put some butter on another piece of cornbread, and drank some sweet tea. Then Grandpa broke the silence by telling about the man who had “walking pneumonia” and couldn’t eat onions, but after Grandpa prayed for him, he ate steak sautéed with onions and was fine from then on. Betty told about how Rodney, her husband, who was a technician at an Exxon gas plant, was healed of plantar warts and his feet ended up as smooth as a baby’s bottom. There followed more stories—about how prayer healed the boy who sucked down a peanut whole, shell and all, and doctors thought he’d die; the boy who was sweating with a terrible fever in bed (probably from polio) and was perfectly well the next day; and the junior high girls who made it safely home from basketball practice in the middle of a tornado-filled hailstorm: “Suddenly there was a clearing around them. They drove home safely with the storm all around, but their car area was clear. They got inside safely. It built the girls’ faith incredibly.” Those girls personally experienced a miracle like all the ones we’d been recounting, and in the future, when the need arose, they’d be able to have even more confidence when they prayed.

When I told the story about finding my watch, I did not expect that it would generate a slew of miracle stories. But I should have, because the four generations of people sitting around that table really believe these things happen—and happen regularly if we pray with enough faith that God can do them. Not only have they heard hundreds of stories like these, but they’ve seen some of them first hand. And the silent response to my question about the lack of healings is as revealing as the healing stories themselves: Pentecostals tend not to tell about the times their prayers go unanswered and miracles don’t happen. They often do just what Grandpa did—fill the silence with more inspiring miracle stories.

My little experience that winter afternoon is not unique; more than half a billion other Pentecostals in the world expect the same kind of amazing miracles when they ask God to help them. They live in a world where God is close enough to talk to, friendly enough to care about warts, and powerful enough to keep an eighteen-wheeler from crushing your van.

It is not my intention here to defend or prove that these stories and events are true. The people who experience these miracles believe that they happen. I know there are many questions about a God who does things like this, and I know that many other explanations can be given as to why these things happened (if they happened at all). For instance, if God can heal, why would God not just heal everybody, or at least a lot more people? It makes no sense to heal a few children miraculously but let thousands of others die. Or perhaps the healings are not by God but are the results of wish fulfillment or the placebo effect. Some theorists have even suggested that humans have the ability to release energy that can heal themselves and even others sometimes, but it’s not God’s doing; it’s just a phenomenon that’s not yet understood. But in the Pentecostal world, healings and miracles are normal, everyday events, and they’re attributed to God. Pentecostals look at it this way: if it happens sometimes, why question it? Keep praying and believing, and your miracle may come.