Believe in Miracles

An occasional series based on stuff that hangs in my room… or my heart.

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the Queen tells Alice in Through the Looking-Glass. When I read the book as a child, I tried that. I tried believing in the very tangible “impossible” things: that I would become shorter or thinner. That I wouldn’t have to wear glasses. That I would be prettier. None of it seemed to come.

Then when I was in college, Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus album came out with the soul-moving “Miracles,” including the lines, “If only you believed in miracles, so would I” and “All we gotta do is get a little faith in you.”

It’s not so much that I didn’t believe in miracles, just that I didn’t believe in them for me. Then, about the time I began thinking about coming back to faith, they started happening. I started my first federal government job less than six months after applying for it. The right apartment for my sister and me came available on the day we were ready to settle for a different one.

The biggest tangible miracle came about eight years ago. My retina detached in Istanbul, and it was nearly a week before I could get medical care. During that week, my prayer community back home went to work. My retinal specialist wasn’t hopeful, but said my vision would be somewhat improved after surgery. In less than a year and after a subsequent surgery, my vision was and remains perfect in that eye, a far cry from the -7.50 where I had been pre-detachment. My specialist credits the prayers.

That experience taught me a lot about miracles. Sometimes, they are precisely what we prayed for. Sometimes they’re not. But they happen all the time, large and small. We grow in faith and calm when we take the time to look for them.