“It’s like a miracle”

I’m pretty sure those are the words that I hear most frequently from my coworker, a devout Catholic woman. 

“It’s Friday!” I will occasionally exclaim when that glorious day has happened upon us.

“It’s like a miracle,” comes the response.

“We finished that set of data,” I remark as I replace a couple folders into the drawer.

“It’s like a miracle!”

“We made a correction! It’s like a miracle.”

At first I smiled and laughed, agreeing with her that it was a wonderful situation. But as this continued to happen, I began to become a little cynical. I’ve always defined ‘miracle’ as something that occurs for the good of man that is beyond our comprehension. Under this definition, the parting of the Red Sea is a miracle. My cell phone is a miracle. People changing their lives is a miracle. Finding peace and forgiveness through the Atonement of Christ is a miracle. But Friday coming? That’s not a miracle. That’s just the common cycle of one day passing into another.

But then I stopped to really think about that. Friday comes with the normal passing of time. And does anybody really understand that? I certainly don’t know where time goes once it has slipped from my fingers. I don’t know why sometimes it goes by so slowly and others more quickly than I can keep up with. If I did, I could possibly figure out how to stop it—how to hold on to precious moments while speeding up the trials of life. But I don’t. I don't even really know what time is. So yes, I see the pattern of Thursday followed by Friday followed by Saturday and winter by summer. But just because I see the pattern doesn’t mean I understand the occurrence. So it is a miracle every time I can tell somebody it’s Friday. Or Tuesday. Or noon. Or bedtime. It’s a miracle of the time and progression God appointed unto us.

But certainly finishing our required work is not a miracle. That’s something we did ourselves. It was because we applied ourselves to the task at hand and focused our energy on processing that data set. There’s no miracle in finishing a task. It’s an understandable principle that if you work on something, it gets accomplished. But have you ever stopped to wonder why that is? As simple as it sounds, why does effort result in accomplishment? And where did I get the stamina to focus on that task? Where did my mental concentration come from? Where did I even get the job in the first place? Those things are miracles. The God of heaven somehow endowed me with the ability to think, with the ability to reason for myself, to regulate myself and my actions. He gave us this miraculous law by which, if we work and apply ourselves to a task, things are accomplished, progression is achieved.

I’m sure that you’ve all heard Albert Einstein’s assessment of life that “There are two ways to live; one is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”  And he was a scientist! No matter how much we learn about the world around us through science, we don’t have all the explanations—there is and will always be an element of wonder in our world. As much as we know about the structure of DNA and how it functions in our body to pass down genes, we don’t fully understand the miracle of heredity. How do little base pairs determine the physical characteristics of a baby? Or what about our immune system—how does that work? And how does a vaccine save lives? How does a tree take carbon dioxide and structure it into bark? How is information transferred through the internet? Despite the best answers that scientists can give, there are very real aspects of the miracles of electricity, the human body, and the world that we can’t even come close to explaining. But God understands it all. And He mercifully gave us these miraculous gifts so that we can live and move and change and do good.

So is there anything in this life that is not a miracle? With the obvious exception of man’s misuse of his freedom to choose, I would be willing to argue that everything is a miracle. It’s a miracle in that the God of heaven bestowed upon us every great gift that surrounds us from the beauty of the mountains to the relationships we cherish. And even more so because we don't fully understand how it all happens or works.

So I'm going to live a little more as if everything is a miracle. I'm going to live a little more in awe of snowflakes and brass bands and a baby's toes and sunrises and textbooks and stars and the Russian language and the love I feel from those around me. Because, after all, everything is like a miracle.