Framing the Mural

Miracles happen everyday.

I know. I know. It sounds trite. Like something you’d read on the side of a coffee cup.

But believe it or not, they actually do. Admittedly, most aren’t of the water-to-wine, raising-Lazarus-from-the-dead variety, but they’re miracles just the same.

They’re there, painted on the wall right in front of us, but we rarely see them.

Why?

It’s not for lack of looking – some days, especially amid the torrents of pain and loss, we search desperately for a miracle, something, anything to carry us onward through the mire. I know I do.

But I missed them, too. Or at least I used to.

We’re looking. But we’re looking in all the wrong places.

And I’m the world’s worst offender.

Yeah, I used to think miracles were nothing more than antiquated scriptural stories, meaningful tales that inspired faith but had little bearing on today’s reality. Coffee cup fodder; cute little phrases to print on calendars and bumper stickers.

It was Kailen, of course, in the depths of her suffering, that ultimately deconstructed my cynicism and opened my eyes.

As I was preparing to write this post, I flipped through Even if you don’t, quietly remembering our journey. It’s easy to get lost in, but some thirty minutes later, I finally landed on a blog entry Kailen had written on May 31st, 2013.

It came at a time when she was recovering from a 3-liter post-surgical abscess in her abdomen, which was necessitating a flight back to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota every two weeks. She had a painful drain hanging out of her side, emptying purulent fluid into a pouch, an ileostomy bag attached to her stomach, and metastatic cancer in her bones.

And yet, here she is:

“9 months ago, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t exercise, I ate the same things all the time, I couldn’t drink coffee, I couldn’t ride in a car, and I couldn’t even go get my own groceries.

But today, I sleep better than I have in years, I work out every day, I eat anything I want, I drank 3 cups of coffee this morning, I can go on a road trip anywhere, and I not only go get my own groceries, but I can even carry them up the stairs by myself!

I know those things aren’t necessarily miraculous, but when I couldn’t do any of them before, much less all in one day, every single one of them feels like a miracle to me.”

In the text above her post, I had written a single sentence:

We were learning that life is all about perspective.

If we think of miracles as being hidden in a dark room, then perspective is the light switch. It illuminates and directs, expands and refocuses; at the risk of being hyperbolic, it changes everything.

I think the best illustration is that of a mural.

Imagine life as a massive, wall-spanning work of art. It’s beautiful and painful, magnificent and tragic. And above all else, it’s overwhelming, too much for human eyes (and hearts) to take in all at once.

Now, imagine perspective as an 8×10 picture frame.

We step up to the mural and place the frame against it, capturing whatever image it contains, seeing only what we choose to see.

And more often than not, the miracles aren’t in our 8×10 of choice.

Thus, we’re in critical need of a reframing, a perspective shift, a different field of view. And possibly, a bigger frame altogether.

Because if we want to see miracles, like Kailen did, like God does, we have to take a few steps back and toss our 8×10 aside.

Heavenly perspective sees the whole picture, in all its beauty and tragedy. And hidden there in sweeping curls of color, in the subtle mingling of joy and pain, are the daily miracles we seek, the abiding mercies, the tokens of hope and reassurance we need to keep going.

It’s how carrying groceries became a miracle to Kailen.

What will your miracle be?

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