Practice Looking for the Miracle

“This mornin’ a miracle happened as promised: the rising of the world’s closest star.”

- Willi Carlisle

We always have a choice: embrace life as a gift, a miracle, a wondrous cacophony of things that could have gone differently but instead brought us to this moment – OR – start checking emails in the middle of an eclipse.

I went home Monday afternoon just in time to pass a pair of eclipse glasses back and forth with my wife. We didn’t make the trek a few hundred miles north and west to see the totality. Perhaps that will come in 20 years or maybe we’ll make our way to Australia in 2028. People tell me that being in the path of totality is a spiritual experience, but I’ve got to say that 82% was pretty remarkable.

It’s a strange thing to realize just how far the light of the sun reaches and the warmth it provides from such a distance. Looking up through those black shades, nothing is visible, only darkness, until your gaze turns to the sun. It’s then that I began to understand how light from our nearest star appears in shady glens, even when the sunset has taken it just below the horizon. That the underside of every leaf is visible sometime during the day because of a burning ball of gas some 93 million miles away. Miraculous.

We always have a choice: take all of that warmth and light for granted or soak it in and give thanks. Now is a particularly good time to give thanks for the light and the warmth. Not only has winter passed and the heat of summer not yet come, but we are also in the midst of the Easter season. It’s just a little more than a week since we proclaimed a man rising from the dead! How many times have I thought about that miracle since standing up in church and saying, “Alleluia, Christ is Risen!”???

Christ is risen, whether I think about it or not. Christ is risen and God goes on creating whether we celebrate it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. We have new life because of who God is, not because of how keenly we keep watch. I don’t have to contemplate the miracle of new life to make it happen. The underside of every leaf is lit by our star whether I look at them or not, but I’m likely to miss it all unless I open my eyes.

Which brings me back to checking my emails during an eclipse. After passing the glasses to my wife, I reflexively pulled my phone out of my pocket. After all, it was 3:03 on a Monday afternoon – work needed doing. As I looked down to swipe open the Outlook app, I noticed the shadows from my favorite tree. I put my phone back in my pocket and I watched the dappled light dance across the grass I try to keep alive, and the oakleaf hydrangeas that we planted so the place would feel more like home and the chartreuse anise plants we put alongside them to keep the deer away. I saw a dozen familiar things, but I saw them all in a new light – literally a unique light – a light that will never come across that back yard again.

I eventually got to those emails. A few were timely, most were junk. Our work demands our attention, and I am grateful for meaningful work in a good place. What a shame it would have been if I’d spent even a few minutes of that particular afternoon miracle entranced by my email instead of entranced by the dappled light. We always have a choice. Practice looking for the miracle.

Now, if I can just start to remember that sending an instantaneous message across any distance and reading it on my phone is also a wonder, then my eyes will be open to every miracle! I’ll let you know if I get there.