Finding Lost Miracles

Four months into the struggle to find a job to support my family and this happened...

Today I prayed for a miracle.  The miracle never came. I pleaded at the start of this new day, a day that pushed out an old one of broken dreams, that the failures of yesterday would be overcome by the success of today. 

The miracle never came and when the sun set, so did my faith. 

Laying on the stone bed of sorrow and resting my head on my pillow of frozen tears, I gaze up into the winters night. Like so many nights before I ponder my choices. All of them seemingly guided and well designed. Yet they seemed to fail. Failures falling all around like a blanket of frost, covering the ground of my soul in ice born sadness. Brittle and hardened, I lay still. In the darkness of night, even sleep fails me. 

Stiff and calloused, another day dawns. In it, in this new day, a scene plays forth. A man of many years, worn by time and unaware of life around him, stumbles in the foggy mist of mind bending age. His wife and his daughter take him by the hands. Sacred hands, hands that once played with tender children and grandchildren. Hands that taught and hands that often were clasped in mighty prayer to God. Hands, now weak and unaware, are now held to guide and steady him. A shell of who he once was, stumbling as the women in his life struggle to help him to rest in his bed. With tears in their eyes they plead with him to convey an understanding that will not come. 

Witnessing this solemn moment, a moment when realization descends on those you love that mortality is at its end, is a scene that breaks through the veil of a new understanding. A miracle was found this day and it was in these women. 

Miracles do not exist in the temporal needs of our earthen struggles.  For what is a miracle? Employment or money? Those things that buy more things that potentially lead us into lives that lead us away from what matters? Today I have enough, enough for my family and me, that is all I need. Work will come and go but miracles are found in the lives around me, not in my temporal desires. True miracles exist in the lives of those who serve. Those who love with pure desire become the miracle. In that miracle of giving, that sacrifice of all, breathes forth new life. A life that will never die but will live in serenity through eternity. 

As one life comes to a close, mine is renewed with faith in the service I see. The miracles of all who serve and give their all to those they love. In my life, I see this in these women I love. A wife, willing to give up her golden years to nurse an ailing husband. A daughter, willing to move on, away from a life she knew to help her fading father.

Today I prayed for a miracle that never came. It never came so that I could see. So that I could see the true miracle, the miracle that is the love in the hearts of those who serve.  

 -The Feeble Soul

© 2013