Once again I am sitting in my living room watching the darkness fade into light. The everyday objects that surround me gradually glow back into visiblity and I find myself pondering them. There is the old steamer trunk currently used to store the grandchildren's toys. Has to ever served to transport an immigrants worldly possessions across stormy seas to the hopes of a new world? How many human hands touched it on its travels? Did a sweaty blacksmith toil or smokey coal fires to forge forge the brass corner pieces? Who and where were the miners ripping the metals from deep within the earth from which these reinforcing pieces smelted? How about the trees used to construct the box. Did they grow in the sweltering heat of some Amazon forest, or the dark of the African jungle, or more probably, just in the green of the new world. How in the world did these things ever find there way into my living room in Fairbanks Alaska? I have no answers to these questions. However, the probability of any of these molecules ending up beside me to store toys is almost infinitely small.
I tend to define a miracle as something that has impossible odds of coming to be. By that definition everything that surrounds me is a miracle in its own right. The wooden rocking chair resting beside the steamer trunk; the tropical plants growing on my window sill; the complex cells organized together that I refer to as my wife. They all are miracles that I have come to take for granted. The probability of any of them existing at this point in time is almost non-esixtent yet the infinite sea of time has molded them to exist in this moment. There does not need to be purpose or willful creator of such things. These of simply constructs of the human brain, which is itself perhaps the greatest miracle formed by the waves on the endless ocean of time.
1 comment:
Love your thoughts about the trunk holding toys. I do wish sometimes that inanimate objects could talk. Or even, especially, the walls of a house holding all that lived within, if they could talk, it would be truly a miracle. It may seem silly but when we moved from the home where we did most of our family living, I went to each room and asked a blessing for the new occupants. The last thing I did as I walked out the front door for the last time was to ask for one more blessing on the newlyweds who purchased the home from us. Since that time, they have sent me an annual Christmas card photo with the last one I received showing the beautiful faces of their three children, two boys and a girl. Their family was just like our family although the girl I believe, was the last born of the three. They have moved out and on and the Christmas cards have stopped but I appreciated their sending those cards to me. It really made leaving seem right somehow. I can't explain it, yet I do believe in miracles.
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