Everything is a Miracle

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

This morning as the clouds cleared and sun streamed through the windows with still bitter cold and untouched white snow on the ground in my backyard, I sat with my coffee and looked at my yellow, blue and floral pillows glowing on my sofa I found myself in deep thought.  The first is that I am so incredibly blessed in my warm beautiful home with people and animals suffering and dying due to the frigid temperatures.  And I thought about all the problems in the world we are facing and that that those problems seem so insurmountable and outside our control.   My thoughts then wandered to last week when one of the men in my Christ based discussion group shared a book on faith he was reading.  As he talked, I realized he was discussing intellectual scientific and faith-based arguments on what is a miracle.  I felt the need to laugh because one of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein suddenly came to mind.  He said, “There are two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other as though everything is a miracle.”  Everything is miraculous if you see and experience life through that lens, but the reality is a large percentage of our world is not because they are focused on surviving the next crisis including not freezing to death or baking in temperatures over 100 degrees.   And I realized the hypocrisy of even writing this blog entry when I live as I do safe in my beautiful home.  But I kept thinking….

Yesterday, I was listening to Bill Gates talk about global warming and he pointed out that a large portion of greenhouse gases are emitted by agriculture including cows.  And then I thought about the series on Magnolia network, the Lost Table where a small rural town restaurant in Freedom, Maine supports farmers who raise livestock, vegetables, fruit, and seafood in the area and how beautiful and amazing that life is, although not easy.  And then my mind flipped back to Bill Gates in his intellectual mode was talking about companies need to produce beef in the lab which is humane and how that was the future of mass produced beef.  Many Americans who regularly eat beef contributing to greenhouse emissions do not realize that other countries are replicating our diet with far reaching environment consequences.  And after reading the Fate of Food by Amanda Little, I know that feeding the growing world population in a warming climate has become a crisis that needs to be met with a variety of solutions, including choosing to eat less meat and grow meat in labs.  But underlying it all is that we have reached a world population number long ago that is not environmentally sustainable, and we need to recognize that fact in developing our solutions.  Do we want a world where communities like Freedom Maine cease to exist because we are developing technical solutions for a population that cannot be sustained by our Earth home given the way we want to live?  Is building electric cars and infrastructure using precious earth resources while we lack the systems to effectively recycle or reuse wise?  At what time in civilized world history do we run out of nonrenewable resources that we are consuming?   How do we reduce our world population to a sustainable level, without accepting mass deaths due to climate change and other causes?  It is a conscious decision, but one we can make.  We can choose differently, but we need to act individually and as a group in making our decisions and deciding what to sacrifice while developing innovative solutions.

And then I come back to my faith in God and my belief that everything is miraculous.  I thought about my Christian friend who spends time praying for miracles to extend the life and ease the suffering of his friends and family, while hoping to be accepted into heaven.  And I asked myself, is prayer without action enough?  I thought about the Christians who believe Jesus is going to come back and save the world they believe is unredeemable.  But in the Gospels Jesus said the kingdom is here and never promised to come back and save us in this existence.  Jesus’ point is that we are saved, but we need to live like it.

God is in the moment.  God is love.  We live in this amazing world and universe which is miraculous and proof of miracles to come.   We are on an eternal journey that does not end within this existence but requires us to make decisions to care for each other.. And we should find joy, chose differently, and have faith that with God and each other we can care for our Earth home.  The end is not certain because there is always faith, love, and hope.  Everything is a miracle.