Miracles are all around, if we would only notice. Think of birth. What could be more miraculous than one unique and fully formed person coming from another? No purely physical process can account for it and all day every day, God incorporates the natural with the supernatural. Isaac Newton came to appreciate the spiritual side of life when he “clearly saw God as an essential part of nature, the ‘first cause’ on which everything else depended.” Meanwhile, Saint Albert the Great wrote brilliantly on how without God we are nothingness surrounded by nothingness -- that we must realize He made us, preserves us, causes us to react, enlivens us, emboldens us, gives us the very energy to move, and in the end draws us closer to Him, if we go along with it.

The more we appreciate the interchange between the physical and spiritual, the more we flow in the stream of life, which means gaining momentum toward larger miracles. Building faith means watching little prayers build into bigger ones.

How good is God! How miraculous! That He would even create us! When we see the constant miracles of life, we begin to view everything from a spiritual perspective.

All day, every day, through the mind, our spirits interact with the world around us. It is from the spirit that the directive goes to the mind and is then translated to the brain, which signals the neurons in the body.

We are above the physical and when we view life in such a way, we begin to develop mastery over it.

As Jesus showed when He cursed a fig tree, we react with our physical surroundings. If we wish something well, it flourishes, while negativity is like a curse that darkens the spiritual (and then the physical) landscape. What is a bolt of lightning but a brief, large current of negative charge, and what is a hurricane but a barometer that is headed downward?

Think of it again as plus and minus. Plus gives. Plus has energy. Negative takes. Negative is hollow. Positive is full. Negative says “no” – including to serving God. The positive says yes.

Yes to God, yes to faithfulness, yes to love, yes to happiness.

From the standpoint of God, Who sees what we cannot, the greatest earthly “tragedy” is just a passing bad moment. The key to gaining Heaven is to live every moment in the way we would want to be judged. The key is to live each moment as if it is our last. When we have eternity on our minds, we lose the negative. Our hearts are filled with gladness, which is a miracle, a gift like every gift that flows from the Holy Spirit. It is available to everyone and joins the important component of hope, which means to look at all matters from a positive aspect: not a Pollyanna aspect, where we try to make it seem like even something truly bad is good, but rather a knowing that there is a light at the end of tunnel – literally.

Often we miss out on a miracle because we gave up or simply didn’t pray enough.

Once I spotted a severe thunderstorm coming. It had not been predicted by the weatherman, yet it looked very intense, the most swiftly-moving, blackest clouds I’d ever seen. It was a localized storm, heading directly our way, and it was hurling tremendous bolts of lightning.  

Immediately I asked God to keep the lightning off our property and it was a very specific request: that it not hit our house. Quickly, I made the Sign of the Cross to “cover” our lot.

The storm struck and lightning hit, all right – missing our house, hitting just feet from our back property line.

That was an answer to a prayer – and a specific answer at that. It missed our yard! But the story doesn’t end there. There was a surge of electricity that swept underground, carrying into the power, cable, and telephone lines, which caused problems in our home.

Our burglar alarm had to be replaced. Two outlets were burned out. A computer was damaged.

And in my mind the reason was simple: I had not persevered. I had not prayed long or thoroughly enough. I had uttered the quick prayer of protection over our property and that had worked, but I had not prayed to protect us from any surge, had not prayed to protect specific items like our computers, alarm system, and other equipment, and had not prayed for the neighborhood in general.

There was a miracle in how the storm had missed us but the miracle could have been bigger. With more prayer, we would not have lost any equipment.

Complete prayer brings larger results.

Why do storms serve as such a good example?

It was during a storm that Jesus admonished His disciples to step out of the boat and into the realm of miracles.

God is love. Love is light. Light is life. God is the Light of life that loves. What heals is love; what kills is judgment. The Light itself is only love. Of all the teachings, the greatest is love. It is accompanied by joy, which is the truest sign that we are living right. Joy in all, joy in Jesus.

 “Whenever a person turns to the Lord the veil is removed,” says 2 Corinthians 3:15. “Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord Who is the Spirit.”

[adapted from Michael Brown's The God of Miracles]

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