I’m reading the book Making Miracles by Dr. Paul Pearsall right now. It’s about the spiritual and scientific explanations about why and how miracles occur.
In Making Miracles, they focused upon amazing health turnarounds that doctors could not have predicted. People recovering from late stages of cancer, people dying and coming back with a story to tell.
Those are pretty extraordinary, wonderful and important. They inspire people! However, they also condition us to think that those miracles are the only ones we get to experience - if we are lucky enough. And it also gives us the impression that miracles are only those experiences that pan out the way we were hoping.
The good news is that miracles can be found everywhere. I love finding them in new and interesting places. The miracles I’ve experienced were significant to me, but perhaps inconsequential to the outside world. Interestingly, I’ve realized that so many miracles are the ones where I didn’t get my way.
The fact that I wake up every morning to a rising sun feels miraculous to me. That every spring, the grasses and flowers and insects and birds re-emerge from some extraordinary slumber is a miracle. Babies are miracles! My teen and young adult children are miracles. People forgiving themselves and others are miracles. Having clean water in our houses is a miracle.
It’s also a miracle that I met my husband. I went through a lot of heartache before him, and I wouldn’t change any of it because it led me to him. It’s a miracle that I didn’t get into my first-choice college because my 2nd choice turned out to be perfect for me.
It’s a miracle I’m back in NJ after vowing never to live here again when I left at 18. We love it here. It’s a miracle that we have 3 children after being so anxious that it would be too hard to handle.
I know you can trace back how these things occur through science and logic. However, when I can attend to these every day, ordinary miracles, I then can be open to see the miracles in all of life. And I can let go of the idea that a miracle can only be life or death, dramatic, or to satisfy my preference.
I may not survive a serious illness if I ever have one. I may not come back from a dying experience. There are no guarantees. But I know that I’ll have the miracle of love for my children and husband. I know I’ll have the miracle of seeing my clients shift in their capacity to love themselves and watch their lives transform. And the day that I pass- whenever that is- I know I’ll get to have that one last miraculous sunrise as I wake up.
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