“Humans, they’re always lookin’ for signs, wonders, and miracles! As if turning sunbeams into wine using a grape wasn’t miracle enough!” Terry Pratchett

Like fish swimming in the ocean are never conscious of the water wherein they live, move, and have their being, we humans live, move, and have our being in a sea of cosmic miracles of which we are unaware.

A friend once said to me: “You’ll never know your own country until you leave it,’ this is true even of our prejudices. The Master taught that ‘many will not enter the Kingdom except by much tribulation’. All too often it is not until something tragic occurs, like a fish getting pulled suddenly from the water or a Near Death Experience, that we are compelled to open our eyes and discover the world around us. Tragedy drags us out of our world of comforting illusions and reveals to us a world of which we were unaware. As Joni Mitchell said, ‘There’s something lost and something gained in living every day.’

Such experiences [spiritual awakening/altered perspective] can precipitate huge changes or, put more precisely, huge corrections to our understanding of reality – bringing us closer to truth.

In such moments an entirely new awareness of and appreciation for the things around us and our place in the universe is born. Our ‘eyes are opened’, we are ‘born again’ – ‘born from above’, stirred awake from our long slumber.

Not always are our awakenings to higher truth so painful. Over and over we see this metaphor employed to communicate the realisation of something marvellous, a gospel: that something greater than we can imagine lies at the heart of creation. This reality reaches beyond the furthest horizons of our imagination all the way down into the hidden deeps of our soul and on. In such moments we discover our very existence is a miracle, wrapped in mystery, adorned in wonders from beginning to end.

It is from the realisation of such truth that abundant joy ever flows, a wellspring in the soul, pouring forth all the energy and inspiration we’ll ever need to transform ourselves and even the world.

People search the world for signs, wonders, and miracles, all the while failing to realise that they are a sign, a wonder, a miracle. You don’t need to look around you for a miracle, you are one; look within, you will find more signs and wonders than you can count. When you find these you find the true meaning of humility and gratitude. You discover the true meaning of worship.