Sacred Simplicities: Seeing the Miracles in Our Lives
Lori Knutson
Path Books, ABC Publishing
Psychologist Carl Jung wrote about the concept of synchronicity, apparently random events that happen in your life and help you. Once you start to recognize these things and look for them, more happen.
This is God at work, and those miracles that Knutson says are circling around looking for a place to land, start to appear in your life once you ask in prayer, and then anticipate their arrival. Sound familiar? Check out the scriptures — you'll realize miracles didn't just appear, they were requested and anticipated. "No one's watching for a miracle and few are praying for one in our church sanctuaries," Knutson writes. "Perhaps there are a hundred miracles circling overhead like exhausted birds, just waiting and waiting for a place to land, if only there was an open space and someone to notice."
Knutson wonders if we make room for miracles. We love the good life, we're comfortable, yet they may be happening all around us and we don't notice.
In a Bible study group we were discussing significant events in our lives. I said, "The biggest change was when I decided, feeling pushed by an inner urge I didn't quite understand, to become self-employed and chose to live without a regular pay cheque."
Thinking of Knutson's comments, I realized that was when I became aware of miracles happening in my life. Being outside of a work structure which I loved, and where I felt secure and needed, I had to look more to God for answers: what do I do next and where do I go? Work arrived quickly; I was soon snowed under. Still, one summer I found myself with nothing happening. "God, what do I do now?"
The next day I was relaxing in a downtown coffee shop when in walked a person I had known for years, but hadn't seen. Chatting, she told me she urgently needed someone to ghost-write articles for a professional journal which she had promised but was just too swamped to do.
You guessed it! That kept me busy and financially secure for the rest of the summer.
Don't know how to ask for a miracle? The word Help sent in prayer is often enough.
Then, expect something to happen. And don't be too fussy about what and when. It may take years. I started my own newspaper five years into self-employment and I began to get intuitions that this was intended to be larger in scope than I had intended. (Intuitions, the gentle inner nudges that come, are one of the ways God lets you know what is required of you. And if you don't listen they get louder and stronger.)
If you want help with this idea read this book. But more, just start. Get into a conversation with God about miracles. Have fun doing it. And see what happens.
