Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Life – Miraculous or Not?

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

~Albert Schweitzer.

This quote might just seem a little extremist but it isn’t really. It simply pays homage to two vastly different ways of sight—both of which are certainly real. But, only one way is the blessed way.

Many people with contend with the quote saying, ‘Surely there’s a continuum connecting both extremes.’

And I guess there is. Most people will see miracles some of the time or most of the time, yet Schweitzer is beckoning us to a better reality—the reality of choice—to be “saved” by the miracles or not. Is there an acceptable middle-ground? Can we sit on the fence?

Lukewarmness is not something any of us should really subscribe to.

Being lukewarm is a sure-fire way to being expelled from the best life has to offer. It is ambivalent to the mood required to go on in life—that to see all of life unfolding as a complete miracle of this reality that none of us can understand, proven by death. The fact that things die, and even we will, turns our no-big-deal perceptions upside down. God gets our attention somehow. Is it perhaps a gripping miracle—that of death—forcing the extraction of life before it all ends?

From the rising to the setting of the sun, a thunderstorm and its lightning and rain, to the birthing of a newborn baby, or even the turnaround in an attitude of a child to his or her own volition, we can see miracles everywhere.

Being alive and blessed with air inspired in our lungs... hearing and speaking... moving and travelling... long vision... music and art... light relief and the escape to fantasy... light from the sun to see and grow things... love...

All these things are miracles. Life is miraculous if we’ll only see.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.

No comments:

Post a Comment