Miracles

When we are very young, children, we look at everything with a sense of awe and wonder.  The world is beautiful and strange.  Because we do not understand it, everything is a miracle.  Lightning bugs, the wind, fireworks, snow, bubbly soda are all amazing.

As we grow older, we start to understand how things really are.  We learn about physics, chemistry, biology.  Science takes away the mystery and fills us with understanding instead.  The miracles are gone.  

We think that when we grow up and understand how things are, they become less amazing.  But what we don't understand is that understanding these things is more amazing than the things themselves.

When we get older still, we realize that understanding does not replace miracles, but is a miracle in and of itself.  How can there be such well-defined rules for how things work?  And who are we to have figured all of this out?

Some might say this is not a miracle, but just the way things are.  But can't "the way things are" still be miraculous?  If not miraculous, can it at least be wonderful?

Miracles are all around you.  What you view as a miracle might change as you grow older, but the miracles don't go away; they just shift in focus.  As we view things from farther and farther away, from the lens of more and more years of experience, we see there is even more to what we thought we knew than we could have ever imagined.  

The painting is so much more beautiful and so much more awe-inspiring the more and more we see of it.  And this painting, this thing we call life, or existence, is the greatest miracle of all.