Start seeing miracles

“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”

Sportscaster Al Michaels’ famous words still resonate today, some 32 years after an unheralded U.S. hockey team defeated the mighty Russians in the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.

The “Miracle On Ice” stretches the definition of a miracle just a bit. “Big, Big Upset On Ice” is probably more accurate. But the question remains: Do we believe in miracles?

The Bible is replete with them: Jesus Christ turning water into wine, Moses parting the Red Sea (with God doing the heavy lifting, of course), Daniel saved from the lions’ den, Lazarus raised from the dead, Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension, just to name a few. The divinely inspired Word of God is a miracle we should delve into every day.

But what about miracles today? None of us has seen someone walk on water or made an axe-head float.

Still, some 2,000 years after Jesus filled the Gospels with miracles, we see miracles every day without recognizing them as the truly special events that they are, and our myopic vision drains God’s world of much of its color.

Huh?

Think about it. My worn-out pocket dictionary defines a miracle as “an event that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a divine or supernatural cause.”

To my way of thinking that covers a very wide swath of everyday life: blizzards, child births, meteor showers, love at first sight, the northern lights, an uplifting song, fireflies lighting up the night, a thunderstorm on Lake Superior, the uniqueness of the human face.

Am I stretching the definition of a miracle? Perhaps, but do all of those things and many, many more that we bump into during the rush of our lives “surpass our human powers” and can be “ascribed to a divine or supernatural cause”?

Definitely.

So, to me, an approaching summer thunderstorm is one of God’s daily miracles. The same goes for a colorful hillside on a bright fall morning or a soft kiss from a spouse.

Miracles.

It’s easy to get mired in our beat-the-clock lives, sprinting from one event to another while wearing blinders, not seeing God’s creation for what it is: an unending display of miracles meant to draw us closer to Him.

What if we slowed down, took off those blinders and began seeing the daily miracles around us? How would our world change?

Would human life become more precious to us? Would we feel closer to God? Would we worship our Savior more often than just on Sunday mornings?

The answer is the same as the one uttered on a cold winter night long ago in Lake Placid.

“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”