Russellings of the Spirit

• It happens every time a microscopic seed grows into a brand new, fully functioning human being.
• It happens every time this relentless muscle of my heart sends blood coursing through 60,000 miles of tiny vessels coiled inside my body.
• It happens every time this precious blue pearl we live on spins soundlessly and perfectly along its path through space.
• It happens every time a long dormant image from the past is retrieved from the dim recesses of my memory and comes to life again in the light of the present day.
• It happens every time colors and sound and light merge in a way that stirs profound emotional responses within all who see and hear it.

And yes… it happened yesterday at approximately 1:03 p.m. Central Standard time. That was the moment we saw the miraculous intersection of our moon with our sun… a satellite 400 times smaller than the sun, and yet 400 times closer to us than the sun… intersected in a way that allowed the one to perfectly blot out the other.

Every single one of those things listed above can only be described with one word: miraculous.

But it seems that only when something truly rare and extraterrestrial happens – something like yesterday’s total eclipse of the sun – are we likely to raise our heads and hands to the sky exclaiming, “OOOH! Ahhhh!” and use words like, “Incredible!” and “Amazing!”

My wife and I traveled to St. Joseph, Missouri to see the Event of Totality with a small group of friends. We drove up the day before, trying to avoid the hundreds of thousands of people on the roads that the Missouri Highway Department predicted.

It was a cloudy day when we awoke and then started pouring rain as we ate our breakfast. In spite of all that, we were fired up for this rare and unusual phenomenon of nature. “What do they know, anyway?” we asked, in reference to the local weather forecasters who predicted cloudy, rainy skies at the moment of totality.

Turns out they knew a LOT.

Our actual view of the sky just before totality.

It was a pretty dismal, gloomy day offering only the occasional glimpse of an actual sun through our special eclipse glasses.

As the moment approached, it got darker and darker. But hey… it was a cloudy day. Cloudy days are always darker than sunny days! Big, flipping deal!

Just as we were wallowing in our disappointment and self-pity, preparing to fold up our chairs and trudge home, IT HAPPENED!

TOTALITY!

True night-like darkness suddenly descended on us. Automatic headlights on cars came on. In a heartbeat, it became 10:30 at night, in spite of the fact that it was actually 1:03 in the afternoon.

It was amazing, exciting, spooky, and thrilling all at the same time.

And utterly, completely miraculous.

Psalm 8 came to mind… “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:3-4, NRSV).

I thought of Isaiah 55:9, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts…”

The only appropriate response to an event of this cosmic magnitude was the guidance provided by Psalm 46:10, spoken by God through the psalmist, which urges us to, “Be still and know that I am God.”

The dictionary defines a miracle as “a surprising and welcome event that is not explainable by natural or scientific laws,” but I must respectfully disagree. I don’t think a thing has to be unexplainable to be called a miracle.

You see, miracles happen all around us, every day. Really smart people can explain the why and how, but I am not sure even the brainiest among us will ever be able to fully grasp the sheer amazingness woven through the fibers of this life we meander through every day.

Sometimes you just have to shake your head and say, “Oh my God!” followed very quickly by “Thank you… thank you… thank you.”

Abundant blessings;