The Miracle Of Radio
The world became much smaller at the end of the 19th century when Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi harnessed the power of radio waves to send Morse Code signals from one place to another without the use of wires. Within a few years he had successfully bridged the English Channel with wireless radio signals, and a few years after that, he transmitted the letter “S” in Morse Code from England to the United States. It was deemed a miracle at the time, and so it was.
Today we have the Internet to bring us voices from around the world. Yet broadcast radio is still viable today, and is still very much a miracle. Imagine someone sitting in front of a microphone, reading a passage of Scripture. The vibrations from their throat thru their mouth create sound waves which are picked up by the mic and translated into electronic signals. These signals pass thru an amplifier and are sent to a transmitter. From there the signals are changed into radio waves and sent through the air until they find an antenna attached to a receiver. Again, translation takes place, as the receiver changes the radio waves back into sound waves and sends them to the ear of the listener. All of this takes place in less than a second. If that isn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.
Another radio miracle occurred in south Tulsa recently. Two young men, David Niles and Adam Minihan, applied for and obtained a low-power FM frequency. (If you know anything about how the government handles such applications, you would agree that even this constitutes a miracle!) They then raised funds to purchase the equipment necessary to transmit a radio signal on this frequency. And they did all of this with no previous experience in radio broadcasting. What propelled them to put in hundreds of hours of time and countless amounts of energy for this? Their desire to provide south Tulsa with Catholic radio programming.
Both David and Adam will tell you that Catholic radio has made an immeasurable difference in their faith. Both are cradle Catholics who long for a deeper and more intimate walk in the Spirit, and that desire has been fueled by programs they have heard on Catholic radio. They wanted to provide this for others living in an area underserved by Catholic media. And now, through prayer and perseverance, Catholic radio is available loud and clear in large areas of Broken Arrow, Bixby, and south Tulsa.
St. Michael Radio is a gift of love for these communities. It’s a gift for you to share with others. It is the result of love, of faith, of hard work.
Is it a miracle? We’ll let you decide that.
