Pausing for Miracles

I asked some friends recently if they had ever witnessed a miracle. 

The question came from a Table Topics card—a game that poses compelling prompts to start a dialogue in a group.

Two of my friends, more scientist-types, immediately responded with a no. 

And the other said, “I don't think so.”

How sad.

In my mind, just that human beings are here on this planet is a miracle! 

The fact animals can adapt to their environment and that zebras have stripes and giraffes have long necks. 

The fact that I can cut my arm and have it heal and grow new skin seems to be a miracle. 

Or that my heart still beats every minute without me thinking about it over 50 years later is a grateful miracle to me.

One of my friends asked me, “How about you?” 

I said, “Of course! When I had my son!” 

I find it a miracle that we as human beings can actually create another—that we can without much effort help a small seed grow into a full-grown body that arrives with personality and purpose.

To me, that’s darn miraculous.

I suppose to be considered a miracle, it shouldn’t normally be explicable by natural or scientific laws. But a miracle can also be any extraordinary event that brings welcome consequences.

How about you?

Do you believe in miracles?

Did any unfold before you today?

I was recently in Israel working with the Jerusalem International YMCA. Spending time in the Holy Land certainly fosters a unique and compelling mindset. Walking through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and seeing five different services going on at the same time, for example, is a miracle to me.

My colleague Mike knows the keeper of the key to that church, so he introduced me to him. This family has been keepers of the keys of this church since 700 AD (except for during the Crusades, where he said they lost ownership of it for 88 years). 

I took a picture with this old man, and as we stood there smiling, he grabbed my hand. 

I thought to myself, here is the person who wakes up at 4:30 am every day with a big job, and with this very same hand he turns the key that opens this church that they believe holds Jesus’s tomb.

That feels like a miracle.

And how does any family hold something for over 1300 years?

Think about that.

That's a miracle too.

We live in a world that trains us to explain everything away. We are taught to reduce wonder to data points and miracles or mere coincidence. But what if we chose differently? 

What if we decided to notice the extraordinary hiding in plain sight?

That stranger who smiles at exactly the moment you need it, the idea that arrives just in time, or the way love finds us when we stop looking?

It's a useful practice to notice the miracles that happen around us every day. We periodically may hear about spontaneous healing. Or make notes of serendipitous meetings with others. Or even opportunities that show up in our lives, divinely guided somehow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” 

I think Emerson was on to something. 

What if we lived as though we ourselves are the miracle?

We are. 

Our presence here, our unique combination of experiences and insights, our ability to touch each others’ lives—none of it is guaranteed. 

All of it is remarkable.

And we are surrounded by other miracles walking around too.

Will you pause long enough today to notice?

And when you pause, will you really take in the spectacular nature of all of this?

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