Everyone has a point in their life when they are going through a hard time and find themselves praying for a miracle. Sometimes the struggle is health related; sometimes it is a family or relationship problem. It may be a spiritual struggle, or perhaps a problem at work or with a co-worker. Especially these days, the struggle may be financial. Concerns about employment, the economy, paying the bills, and fears of what the future may hold are very real for many people.

While we pray for a miracle it is easy to forget that miracles aren’t always pretty or pleasant. They do not arrive into your life with background music from the New York Philharmonic or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They are not illuminated by beams of sunlight shining through breaks in clouds like the background of a cheesy religious Hallmark greeting card. Usually they do not even announce their presence. Instead they slip in and out of our lives quietly and under the radar, often unnoticed because of our preoccupations. They sometimes come to us disguised as undesirable, perhaps even heartbreaking, moments that shake us to the very core of who we are. Miracles are not burning bushes, nor crying statues. They aren’t moments of divine intervention that rid us of all of our burdens in one fell swoop. They do not leap tall buildings and save us from situations in which we were meant to save ourselves. They are not something for which we should sit and idly wait. That is not how miracles work. That is not what they are.

Yet, our lives are overrun with miracles. We just have to learn how to spot them. When you think about it, the fact that we are alive is miraculous. The fact that we have consciousness and thought is miraculous. The things we’ve built, the stories we’ve dreamed, the words we’ve written, the lives we’ve shaped, the society we’ve fashioned, the people we have loved and the ones we hae forgiven, the list goes on… these things are all miraculous.

It’s a miracle when things make us laugh at the very moments we need to the most, and it’s a miracle how something as simple as spending time talking to a child can help us to realize how little we know in comparison to them. It is miraculous when a song comes on the radio out of the blue addressing a worry we’d been carrying around – sometimes for many years. It’s miraculous thinking that there were exact moments when people who would ultimately play major roles in our lives entered into our stories, and its miraculous that there are more of those moments and people yet to come. It is a miracle how we can be stripped against our will of the unimportant material things to which we unnecessarily cling. It’s miraculous that no matter how far off the path we travel, life has a way of setting our courses straight again. It’s a miracle that we are presented with hardships that shape us, and it’s a miracle that we are given (seemingly out of the blue) people and tools to make those hardships more bearable.

We are all, at various points in our lives, forced to endure storms or hardship. During those moments, it’s incredibly hard to label anything miraculous. It’s easy to sit in the downpour and wait for our miracles to come, blind to the fact that miracles are already all around us. The miracle may very well be the storm itself, and the role it plays in who we are to become. The miracle may be in what the storm washes ashore for us, who it brings into our lives, or the miracle may be how hard times have a way of making us remember our awesome capacity for love and acceptance. Out of everything, this is the biggest miracle of all.

On a personal level, miracles shape my day to day existence. They are as unassuming as the many friends who have stood quietly by me while through some very tough circumstances and scary change. They are present in the privilege I have of doing the same for others from time to time. They have been as violent as the events in my life that have brought me to my knees, let like steel purified by fire, I find miracle in becoming better for having gone through these experiences.

Never doubt the existence of the miraculous and divine; just learn how to spot it.