Enjoy the Little Miracles
Rev. Dr. Steven Koski
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“Experiment with being soft when your impulse is to be hard, generous when your impulse is to be withholding, open when your impulse is to close up or shut down emotionally. When there is grief or sadness, try letting it be here. Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling…be with the experience itself. Trust in your deepest strength of all: to be present, to be wakeful.” ~Jon Kabat-Zinn. Sometimes I think the spiritual life is simply to be awake. The Bible says, “This is the day…”.Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. This day. Be awake to this day.
A student asked his teacher, “How can I draw closer to God?”
She said, “You can’t get any closer to God than you can make the sun rise in the morning.”
The student asked, “Why do I bother with all of these spiritual practices like prayer, study, serving others?”
His teacher said, “So you are awake when the sun does rise.”
Trust in your deepest strength – to be present, to be wakeful.
The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it is an entirely brand-new sun, different from the sun they witnessed the day before. They are taught the sun is born anew each morning and it will live for the duration of one day. In the evening, it transitions with gracious colors to another world. As soon as children are old enough to understand, elders will take the children out at dawn and say, “The sun has only one day. You must live this particular day in a good way, so that you don’t take the sacred gift of the sun for granted. It is this day that asks to be shaped by your heart and your hands.”
What screws us up most in life is the picture in our heads of how life is supposed to be or how we wish it will be someday. Sometimes when we pray for the miracle we hope will arrive some day we miss the thousand tiny miracles hidden in this day. The simple act of acceptance, of returning mindfully to each step of our path can bring us the miracle we need – our whole selves and the invitation to shape this day with our heart and hands.