God’s Everyday Miraculous Providence

As a seminarian, I am reading, writing about, and studying the miraculous all the time.  Deep dives into Bible passages, theology, and the history of the relationship between mankind and humanity. Pretty miraculous stuff. After a while the miraculous begins to sound normal, common…everyday. Maybe these things sound normal, common, and everyday because they are normal, common, and everyday?

To be clear, I do believe in the uncommon and miraculous interventions of God in this world but I have found that often these are the only events that we consider miracles and acts of God. We fail to consider how mysterious the providence of God is. How it operates and makes itself manifest in ways that we can never understand or recognize. The fact that I was born, that I woke up today, that I cut my hand and it healed by itself, that I am able to pray to the Creator and Sustainer of all things–nothing short of a miracle! The fact that the sun shines down, giving plants nutrients that would be used to feed animals that would in turn be used to nourish humanity is normal. It is only normal because we observe it every day, but with some larger perspective I’m convinced that it is not so boring. God had a perfect, infinitely complex, plan in mind when He designed His creation and every single soul that would inhabit it. If that is not miraculous, I do not know what is. The fact that God breathed everything into existence is maybe the most miraculous event ever, and we live in it.

If maybe you feel as if you are struggling to see God in your day to day, open your mind to the possibility that miracles are happening all around you all the time. Someone saying something encouraging when you are down, seeing the beauty of blooming flowers, hearing the harmony of a piece of music, experiencing the love of a friend or family member. These may all be commonplace, but they are also miraculous. Every Sunday we gather together and one of the things that we do is participate in the sacrament of communion. We ask the Holy Spirit to make the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and it is. Boom…miracle! That is at least one miracle that we can count on every single week among many others that we are too blind to see. Remind yourself that the everyday, common, boring is actually exciting, rare, and miraculous. If you need even more reminding, open your Bible and read about the miracles of old. I'll let you in on another secret that the Bible tells us. Those miracles in the Bible are happening today. We are actually in the Bible too. Between Acts and Revelation is God’s people…that’s us. Turns out our boring day to day is actually pretty miraculous.