Finding Ordinary Miracles

When I was in elementary school, my parents bought a book illustrated by James Christensen that told a fantasy story where the main characters go on adventures on a ship under the banner "Believing Is Seeing." It was a nice story, emphasizing, essentially, that faith precedes the miracle. 

I don't think I absorbed the moral very well, because I interpreted that phrase to mean that faith is the admission price of the miracle, the prerequisite to having amazing things happen in your life. I think it's actually because you need a believing state of mind to see miracles, because hints of divinity are around everywhere.

For example, whenever I make muffins and the batter produces more than the recipe's listed quantity, I think of the miracle of Elijah and the widow. Now could this event be explained by other means? Probably...but in that moment I am in the state of mind to see abundance.

Another example: I'm on a walk with my toddler, and I need to convince him to walk in the direction of the car [usually quite the arduous task, because he doesn't like to be directed...that may be toddlerhood, or that may be a trait he inherited from me...]. In that moment, he sees a goose and toddles after it, changing the trajectory of our walk, and the goose walks toward the parking lot with our car. I call it the Miracle of the Goose, because it's what I needed. I have several examples like this, where some distracting thing--a plane, an ambulance, a flock of birds--pulls Nathan's attention away from the tantrum he was in. Are those things likely to be there anyway? Well, yeah...but the timing was great.

I have more improbable stories, but what makes them memorable is not the resolution of some story arc--ie I can't say that a life was saved, or that I met someone I wouldn't have otherwise, or any other sort of clincher that elevates the occurrence to something newsworthy--but the very fact that they are so ordinary.

Back when Mark and I lived in DC, and when the Newseum was still there, we borrowed two membership cards to take my brother and sister-in-law to the museum. On the escalator ride up from the metro, I saw a ticket for the Newseum, so I picked it up. When we got to the ticket booth, amazingly, it was valid, so we only had to pay for one ticket. I don't think it made a difference in our budget [though admittedly our budget was tight because DC is expensive], and it's quite probable that someone dropped the ticket on the way to the Newseum, but to me it was a miracle.

Once, on a bike ride with a friend along a 13-mile trail, she lost a screw to her bike. It wasn't a crucial screw; I think it was one of a couple securing the water bottle cage to the frame. But we wanted to find that screw. And so as we rode back toward home, looking in the dirt and grass, I was silently asking God for a miracle. At one point, another cyclist asked if we were okay [cyclists are pretty friendly about that. they're a good community], and when we responded that we were looking for a screw that had fallen off at some point in the ride, she told us, "oh, it's gone", indicating the unlikelihood of finding it. But guess what--we found it.

I held onto that story as I was looking for a small silver BB in the mulch at a playground, where a kid had dropped it and wanted his mom to help him find it. As she had earlier caught Nathan as he went down a slide, I was desperately hoping I could help her so that I could maybe have a friend. So I offered to search as well, knowing that I could possibly, but not probably, find it. Hope springs eternal. I found it, and gave it to them.     Nothing has happened since--I haven't seen her, I don't remember her name--but it was a little moment that helped sustain me in my loneliness. 

a screenshot of the monitor showing his eye

The most improbable story involves Nathan and an MRI. He's in a brain research study that is looking at how the brain develops in average kids, compared to those from homes where illicit drugs are used, and every once in a while they get a brain MRI. It stresses me out every single time, because I'm supposed to get him to sleep, and then he is supposed to stay asleep as the research assistants put him on his back on the MRI gantry table, and he needs to stay still so that the image is clear. The scan itself takes 40-60 minutes. But getting him to calm down in a new place, and getting him back to sleep as he is disturbed by position changes and ear plug placement and the whirring of the MRI, takes several hours. For this most recent scan, we showed up at 7p. The scan didn't start until 11p. He had freaked out when he heard the 'white noise' machine they had [in his defense, it sounded like a vacuum, and he is terrified of the vacuum], he couldn't sleep on his back on the table, and things weren't going well. I was pleading with God that we could just get the scan, because I was tired and wanted to go home. Eventually we got him to where he was calmly lying--awake--on his back on the gantry [at one point he calmly pulled out an ear plug and handed it to me, the little stinker], and I told them to just start the scan even though he wasn't asleep [sleep isn't necessary for this scan, but it is a handy way to keep a toddler relatively still and quiet]. I had this wild hope that he would stay calm through the clicking and pulsing of the machine. An assistant crawled up on the table below him to pat his legs and reassure him, and they raised the table and put them in. And it worked. He was awake for most of the scan (there's a little camera inside centered over his right eye, as a means to monitor head movement), and he was still. The MRI operator had expressed her doubt that we could get this scan done, and then got to say in amazement that he was doing spectacularly well. Oh, it was a big miracle. 

None of these incidents were critical to my health, happiness, or salvation. I don't think it's impacted anybody else's health/happiness/salvation either. But I'm not measuring miracles by how important they are in the big picture of things. I'm defining miracles as little evidences that God is paying attention to me. It's a little bread crumb of hope that keeps me going on the path towards home.