Instead of Practicing Gratitude… Look for Miracles
We all think of November as the month of gratitude. Thanksgiving arrives, and we pause to name what we’re thankful for. For many people, gratitude has become a month-long (or year-round) practice.
I’m not going to belabor the concept of gratitude or list its many, many benefits. I love gratitude. It changed my life.
But… the way gratitude is portrayed on social media has made it feel watered down, trendy, and—if we’re honest-a little bit repulsive.
Gratitude can improve your life and it won’t fix everything.
But this email is actually not about gratitude.
It’s about miracles.
Miracles carry a different energy. They feel rare, almost impossible. We tend to think of miracles as big, dramatic, extraordinary events:
A spontaneous healing
A near-miss car accident
A huge sum of money landing in your lap
We don’t think miracles happen to us. Other people? Sure. But us? Probably not.
The definition of a miracle includes the idea that it’s unexplainable and beyond what the ego mind believes is possible. There’s also the element of “divine agency.” And for many of us, God or the Divine doesn’t seem to show up in our ordinary lives...especially not while we’re unloading the dishwasher.
So we categorize miracles as something huge, something rare, something that happens when some higher power decides it’s time.
But…what if miracles were happening every single day?
What if the Divine is present even in the most mundane moments, even while you’re doing the dishes?
If I’m honest, I didn’t believe miracles were for me. Other people, sure. But not me. And I definitely thought miracles had to be these giant, dramatic events.
For example, when I was pregnant with my daughter, my doctor told me I wasn’t actually pregnant. She said I had an “empty sac pregnancy.” But I felt so sick that it didn't make sense to me. I felt pregnant, so I refused all interventions.
A few weeks later, we did another ultrasound, and there she was, my girl, frantically wiggling her little blobby body with her tiny arm buds moving as if to say, “I’m here!!”
The doctor gasped, “It’s a MIRACLE!”
And in my head I thought:
No, bitch, your tests were wrong. I just listened to my body.
I didn’t see it as a miracle… just intuition.
But now? I can see the miracle: I trusted myself.
I trusted something deeper, likely a nudge from the Divine.
And I never saw that doctor again.
As I’ve worked on my relationship with the Divine, I’ve opened into the idea that miracles aren’t rare. I’ve started to see them in those small things of life:
Thinking of someone and they text you
A wound healing
Breathing (yes, that’s a miracle)
Finding the exact ingredient you need at the store
Training a rescue puppy to sit
The last bag of cranberries on the shelf at Thanksgiving (truly miraculous)
Making an amazing friend or finding your partner
And then there are the bigger, but still human, miracles:
Saying the thing you’ve avoided your entire life
Sobriety
Reaching a goal that once felt impossible
Setting a boundary
Getting a scholarship
Making a different choice and going against your "usual" mode of operation
Listening to Divine guidance and trusting it
And yes, sometimes the massive miracles happen, too...like winning the lottery or surviving an illness. But those aren’t the ones that shape our everyday lives.
It’s the tiny ones. The things we don't see or take for granted.
When you start looking for miracles, you start finding them.
You begin to notice the little things and feel them as Divine messages, Divine timing, Divine love. And once you notice them, more appear. Big ones. Small ones. Mundane ones. All of them feeding your soul.
As we enter the season of thanks and then move into the magic of December, I invite you to look for miracles in the mundane.
And then keep doing it all year.
Because the Divine is not far away.
She is woven into your daily life.
Miracles surround us every day. You just have to look.
