My favorite, ordinary miracles are events in our or our loved ones' lives that are so astonishingly wonderful that they jolt our faith with electric excitement, water our dying buds of hope to bloom afresh, and set our weepy love dancing.
Ordinary miracles bless our relationships. A rebellious son or daughter suddenly grows up. A wandering spouse decides to return to a marriage. An atheist or agnostic re-discovers the home of faith that he or she abandoned years ago. A parent with dementia remembers your name for one tender moment as he lays dying. You fall in love unexpectedly and inexplicably when you'd given up on love ever happening to you. You or someone you love overcomes a destructive addiction. Two relatives or friends suddenly have the grace to reconcile.
Ordinary miracles push us to overcome fear and discover whole new facets of who we are. You may go on a trip and discover a whole new area of the country where you want to live and get a new lease on life. Or you discover that the career you planned for in college isn't the one that gives you life now - a new one is. Sometimes you can work to develop a talent you've neglected for years and receive an unexpected push to take your new creations out into the world.
Ordinary miracles bless our bodies too. You or a loved one is healed of a serious illness. Or a loved one with a serious illness has a peaceful death when you feared a prolonged or painful one for him or her. Or your Doctor puts you on a new medicine that helps your chronic illness.
Ordinary miracles bless our battered emotions. You thought you would die of a broken heart because you lost someone; then slowly, imperceptibly you heal enough to laugh again, or listen to music, or celebrate a holiday with joy.
I have heard all these stories from happily amazed people. They are neither uncommon nor new. The sad reality is that so few people thank God for these joyous happenings. People think they're a coincidence, or a piece of good luck. But a God Who tells us that every hair on our head is counted is a God Who is actively involved in our lives, in many mysterious ways, because He loves us too much to stay away! Because we have this amazing God Who cares for us, we should never give up. HIS MERCIES, HIS GRACE, HIS MIRACLES ARE NEW EACH MORNING.
Life is an unpredictable roller coaster that ascends into light and descends into darkness with terrifying rapidity. Disasters try our minds, hearts, and souls, frazzling our nerves and our faith almost past endurance, and they're followed by triumphs as elation-inducing as a show of fireworks, which are followed by stupefying tragedy once again. That's life, yet no matter how bad it gets, people rarely opt to give it up, because they hope for goodness and peace to come again. Our eyes of faith help us see life's beauty so that we say quite simply: Life is a miracle, and it's a miracle that God our Father created us to have this gift of life.
Jesus is life's miracle-worker who lived life to the fullest. He shook with fear, joked with his friends, loved his relatives, healed and taught hundreds of people, ate meals when famished with people from every social class, danced at weddings, wept with grief at the death of friends, and ultimately bled, literally tortured to death, to miraculously set us free from sin. By his blood, our sullen, sinful, divided hearts are healed!
But Jesus also walks with us every day, guiding us, and his Holy Spirit inspires us to love more and more deeply. It's loving ourselves and others with Jesus' love that produces the most positive, life-changing miracles in our lives and the lives of others. Jesus' love is a love that listens, accepts, reconciles, challenges, encourages, and endures. When we love with Jesus' love, our lives are on fire and give off an incredible energy. This energy lights candles of love in others' hearts, turns on light bulbs of hope in others' minds, ignites explosions of faith in others' souls.
Yes, we have Jesus within us! We are Christ-bearers to the world! God counts on us to be the willing instruments who open others to receive miracles of grace and blessing in their lives!
Jesus rose from the dead and so gave us the greatest miracle of all! Because of the miracle of the coming of Jesus into our cold, barren world, and his death, and his resurrection, the day of our death is the day of our birth to new life. As Max Lucado says, "May you live in such a way that your death is just the beginning of your life." Eternal life - a time of eternal miracles!