We recently rearranged the furniture in our living room. We had the television placed above the fireplace and now our comfortable recliners that Mark and I love to sit in to relax at the end of the day, are oriented in that direction. Two large windows on either side of the mantel look out on the woods.
In the winter, the trees are absolutely bare, as far as the eye can see, stark and brown after shedding their leaves.
But now Spring has come and with it new life. Weeks ago, the barren trees began to bud and now there is a lush canopy of green filling the space as we look out those windows.
“What a miracle!” I thought the other day. Really the difference in what we see as a miracle or business as usual, is sometimes just “time.”
Let me explain.
If we had gone to bed one night and the trees were bare, and the very next morning, they were filled with mature leaves, we would have called that a miracle. But because it happened over the course of a few weeks, we do not think about it as being a miracle. New leaves coming gradually on the trees in Spring is “normal,” just like the sun rising and setting and all the fine tuning of the universe that keeps us predictably, yet miraculously, set on course for life to flourish.
In his book, “Miracles,” CS Lewis expresses this concept much more eloquently:
“God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see… But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off.”
The mask is off indeed. If we have eyes to see, we can know “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, that have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world” (Romans 1:20).
So today, look around you for the miracles, even the slow ones.
Life By The Way 