No Magic Wand

Even non-Christian magicians understand it: If the power which calls you does not own you, you’ll never see it.
We expect children to be childish. We expect adults to nostalgically long for some of the reduced burden of responsibility children have, but we also expect those adults to recognize when it’s not safe to indulge in fantasy. A critical part of growing up is recognizing what parts of childhood aren’t supposed to die, because they arise from something universal in the human soul.
So a child will paint themselves and put on costumes because it allows them reduce the fears and discomforts, to retreat from the painful, boring reality to some place where they are actually in control. Or they’ll simply watch videos and cartoons which allow them to ignore reality for a while. An actor will paint himself and don a costume because something inside him calls out for expression, something bigger than himself and his fears. He doesn’t retreat into fantasy, but offers a taste of it to others. It’s not about the artist, but the art itself. He’s no longer the child, but plays to children and helps them build a sense of reference.
The magic wand is a fable, more of a parable than some long lost real power. Real supernatural events are seldom so exciting, seldom with spectacular displays and thrills. The greatest, most powerful miracles in the world are the ones eyes can’t see. Sparkles, tinkling bells and flashing lights as dirt turns into gold are childhood fantasies. The real thing isn’t some violation of natural law, but is reaching for a higher law of nature most people refuse to recognize.
The basic principle of human brokenness includes three fundamental weaknesses. One, we are driven to satisfy mere physical desires by raging hormones and body signals, cast like thunder and lightening into the conscious mind by our emotions. Two, we have a bottomless curiosity and appetite for spectacle, a tarnished sense of beauty we must to consume with our minds. Three, we are driven to control all things as if we were gods. By these things we approach our world as something to conquer so we can indulge our lower desires. By these things we seek magical control which never existed, except in fairy tales.
The real deal, the genuine exercise of divine authority, is nothing like that. First, it rejects human appetites as utterly untrustworthy. The self must be put in restraints. It’s not the world around us we control, but the world within. That gnawing appetite for control, for satisfaction of desires, must be fought, killed constantly, again and again. Nothing within the human frame can be trusted with any power. Second, it seeks to transcend that dead frame. There is something higher, something far, far better. The human self simply can’t go there on its own, so it has to die, in a sense. It has to be subdued, dragged along as an unwilling participant. Divine authority operates only on divine purpose, not on human driven need or desire.
Yes, know that human nature fully, because that’s necessary to know when it rears its ugly head, intruding once again on something too precious for human will to appreciate. Receive and absorb that otherworldly agenda, that higher purpose and understanding. Turn the Sword of Truth on the self or you’ll have no power to wield it. Once you have killed your lesser self with it, you realize it can only be used in that higher realm. Changes wrought by divine power in the higher realm always manifest in the lower realm, but seldom as human intelligence expects, and never as it desires.
Yes, sometimes it manifests as miracles the way Jesus healed thousands by the Sea of Galilee. For the most part, He simply reasserted His Father’s divine will over things denied by those who had the responsibility, but refuse to take it. We call them signs and wonders because they signify something we should have already understood. It was there, has been there since the world began, but people keep thinking they can sneak back into the Garden of Eden by some human talent or skill. They want the thrill and arrogance of control over the Garden Adam exercised in innocence. They don’t want the power and control exercised over the human self in that other garden, Gethsemane.  They forget — truculently deny — Adam was merely executing the Creator’s revealed will before the Fall. He lost it all when he surrendered to that insistence he could decide what was good and right, and didn’t need to keep a constant reference to revelation.
Signs and wonders are merely the restoration of what ought to have been, what could have been all along. If you have no idea what ought to have been, you’ll have a tough time seeing such power come through your hands. You won’t get there by reason, because the Fall was fundamentally a choice to rely on human reason and intellect. You must toss reason aside, put it back in its lower place as servant of the divine impulse, the mere implementor of things, not the executive.
There’s no magic wand. You don’t see signs and wonders because you reject their nature.