Friday, November 13, 2009

Making My Day!

Each of my days are miracles. I won’t waste my day; I won’t throw away a miracle.

—Kelley Vicstrom.

I’ll hound you for the rest of your life if you’ll let me. Yes, that’s right. This irrepressible message will find its way into your mind and heart if it has anything to do with me. When I’ve found the good news, why would I not share it?

The statement that each of my days is a miracle is a truth we all so often take for granted... taking the miraculous as common place is actually quite a hilarious, yet God-offending tragedy, and it’s the fact of life for the vast majority of the human race. Chewing up and spitting out the miracle on a daily, even momentary, basis is a travesty for the person, for those close to the person, and for that person’s God!

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson.

So, if a travesty is taking the miraculous everyday and thinking of it as common place, and Emerson’s quote says the opposite is approaching wisdom, then taking our daily moments for granted must be foolishness. It characterises a life not well spent.

The biblical take on miracles is significant. It is apostles that do miracles (2 Cor. 12:12). And apportioned the same space as miracles are signs and wonders (Acts 2:2; 2 Thess. 3:9; Heb. 2:4). But, these miracles that the Bible talks about are plain, smacking-you-in-the-face realities of the bizarre—no wonder people paid attention.

The biblical miracle, for instancethe healing miracle, still occurs but this is not the miracle we’re specifically talking about. It needs to be said, however, that these everyday miracles we do talk about are biblically set; they’re gospel miracles and miracles of creation.

“He does great things too marvelous to understand.

He performs countless miracles.”

—Job 9:10 (NLT).

The real miracles—the ones of most significant in the divine realm—are those that occur in God’s natural creation and certainly in the mix of God’s moral reality. These resplendent things like the fact and motion of time, cellular growth, the physical laws, the near-perfect (once perfect) construction of things, the senses, the notion of love and of being... being itself is utterly amazing. These are constant miracles.

Job posits the wonder of God. Much of what he and his friends are forced to consider is the very nature and character of God—the nature and character to life we’d ordinarily prefer to ignore and take for granted.

Then there is the story of our lives. So special is our God that he gives each one a story of their very own; a moment-by-moment experience second-to-none. The miracles hold vast scope in their manifestation—they can never be predicted or even accurately discerned. They just are. And they simply unfold. What now?

Making my day is... at last... a choice. A little strength of faith is all that’s required. In the context of a mustard seed, Jesus told us in terms we can understand, so we know what happens with even a pinch of faith appropriately placed:

“Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.”

—Matthew 13:32 [cf. 17:20] (NIV).

Faith—nurtured—grows boldly, generously, vivaciously, irresistibly! Making our day becomes habit after a while. Things just get better.

Sure, we won’t feel like making every day a winner, not at the start perhaps. But, as we reflect on this golden truth, that we have this day, we’re made; truly made!

© S. J. Wickham, 2009.

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