Uneventful Miracles

"In seven seconds, share this message with seven people and you will receive a miracle tomorrow." Anyone who has a personal computer and forwards emails to friends will receive messages like the above one. There are promises being made every day with directions to forward a certain email to others, usually seven, 10 or 12 people. If you do, then good things are bound to come to you, the email predicts. I get similar forwarded emails all the time.

So yesterday I forwarded the above message to seven of my email buddies. I would just test the promise and see if I received a miracle. I waited all the next day for my miracle.

Nothing changed; nothing was different or out of the ordinary, nothing supernatural.

No one came knocking at my door with a Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes or anything like that. In fact it rained all day long and I stayed home, reading, and cooking a pot of deer stew. I talked on the phone a couple of times, and that was it.

Then this morning I got to thinking. Maybe a miracle did happen. Not like turning water into wine or walking on water. But maybe having an uneventful day was a miracle.

No doctor called to tell me my cancer had returned. I've been cancer free for 14 years with no recurrence.

No one called to tell me one of my children had been involved in a horrific car crash. Yes, they have health problems but they can walk, see, and hear, and those are miracles we take for granted. I did not break my toe on the vacuum cleaner as I have done in the past. Two girlfriends who live in distant towns called to chat, bearing only good news. My house didn't catch on fire or a tree fall on the house. And the New Madrid earthquake didn't happen. There were no bomb threats at the school.

When I flipped on the light switch, the dark room was illuminated. The furnace purred with heat that warmed my cold feet. Water flowed freely from the kitchen faucet as I readied my coffeemaker for my morning coffee. I hit the power button to the television set and immediately I listened to a recap of national news. The recession is ending, an anchor man said. I did not go hungry or thirsty on my miracle day.

To some people in poverty stricken lands, those would be miracles beyond their wildest dreams. In America we take those mini miracles in stride, never really giving them much thought, certainly never considering them to be miraculous.

We go to church on Sunday without fear of reprisal. No one is going to come knocking on our door and arresting us as terrorists, or driving us away from our land causing us to wander in the wilderness.

I can proudly fly the American flag in front of my home, and I do, and salute our veterans on patriotic days. I can support our president or speak out against his policies.

No one can tell me there are no miracles.

A newborn baby is a miracle. And the love we feel for that baby is a miraculous thing.

So, maybe I have experienced a miracle without realizing it.

Miracles don't have to come in a bolt of lightning. They can happen on an ordinary day, in uneventful ways.