Pastor Mark Adams of Redland Baptist Church in Rockville, Maryland, shared this thought with his congregation recently:
Albert Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if NOTHING is a miracle. The other is as if EVERYTHING is.”
If I were to ask if you had ever experienced a bona fide miracle, I’m guessing that … depending on your definition … that you’d likely say “no.” Let’s see if I can change your way of thinking.
In the time it takes to listen to one of my sermons, a person inhales and exhales about 250 times. Since most of us don’t give breathing a second thought, let’s use something Mark Batterson, pastor of National Community Church, wrote to help us review the journey of one of the oxygen atoms you and I breathe in:
“It all begins when air passes through your nose, where unwanted dust and debris is filtered out. The average person moves about 440 cubic feet of air per day through the nose and trachea and into the lungs. The surface area of your lungs is forty times greater than the surface area of your body—compressed within the tiny space between your ribs. Once in the lungs, the oxygen atoms hitchhike with hemoglobin and travel throughout the entire human body via blood vessels. If those blood vessels were laid end to end they would be approximately 100,000 miles long. That means the blood vessels in your body could wrap around the equator four times. At the end of its journey, the oxygen atom enters individual cells, bonds with the food we eat and releases energy. In his article ‘The Miracle of Breath,’ James Robinson writes: ‘Webster’s Dictionary defines a miracle as “an extraordinary, unusual wonder or marvel.”’ Isn’t a bloodstream 100,000 miles long, in a small body, an unusual wonder? Isn’t the journey of an oxygen atom a true marvel? We don’t need supernatural events to experience a miracle. All we need is breath. The human breath is sacred. Cherish your breathing: it is the miraculous gift of life.”
Kind of takes your breath away doesn’t it!?
Acts 17:25 says that God “…gives all men life and breath.” Job 34:14–15 says that if God were to withdraw His breath from humankind, we would return to dust. The bottom line is this: every breath we take is a miracle of God. The average person takes approximately 23,000 breaths per day. That means you experience about 23,000 miracles every day!
We are surrounded by miracles, so we have a choice to make. As Einstein puts it, we can live as if nothing is a miracle or we can live as if everything is. I think it is more intelligent to choose the latter, for as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”
Think of it: if we could do that, if we could train ourselves to see God’s miracle-working power around us at all times, wouldn’t we be bolder disciples? If we learned to rest in the fact that God constantly does the miraculous, wouldn’t we experience more of the peace He promises?
© 2012 Mark Adams
And, we’ve come so far . . .
Then, take a moment to look at miracles from a whole difference aspect: For a person who is younger than Ben Speer, but older than Bill Gaither, all I need to do is think back over the past 77 years I have been on this earth and review what our God has made possible for man’s mind to conceive and develop just in the world of communications. Today, we have the computer and the ability to send messages and pictures and we have satellite communications, making it possible for you to listen to enLighten and 100+ of other channels of musical and talk radio programming no matter where you go in North America … plus see live television pictures from just about any location around the globe.
Going back 70 years to the World War II era, there was the telegraph and the telephone. Yet, the connectivity between continents was so limited that the radio networks were forced to use international shortwave radio for bringing reports from London and the European Front … which were constantly marginalized and interrupted by atmospheric conditions.
God’s miracles … big and small … without which, where would we be?
Marlin
