a modern day miracle

'Tis the holiday season, the time when we recount miracles of all kinds.

Usually, this is my favorite time of year. Never mind being Jewish. I love the lights, the music, and the sappy movies, but more than the festivities, I love that people, if only for a brief moment, seem kinder toward one another. Well, until this year, that is.

This year feels different and finds me with a longing heart. If people are being kinder toward one another, I don’t readily see it, and so it’s got me wondering what a miracle would look like today and how we’d recognize it.

In the dictionary, “miracle” is defined as “a wonder, a marvel, an extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause” – in other words, a work of God.

By that definition, in today’s world, love, kindness, and compassion are miracles.

Looking around, I don’t need any extra convincing of it. So I want to talk about becoming the miracle of love, kindness, and compassion in a world looking more and more devoid of it.

We can start by knowing that even with those we would acknowledge that we utterly despise, we share something in common. And I would argue that what we share in common is our pain.

Pain levels the playing field. It finds us all – the richest and the poorest, the mightiest and the meekest among us and it wreaks equal havoc on all our lives.

Pain exposes our inherent vulnerability, which I think is a good thing, because it can be the invitation we’ve been secretly longing for that reconnects us with one another.

The antidote, the only antidote for our pain, be it individual or collective, is love, kindness, and compassion.

For starters, I’m extending those things to myself. We can’t give away what we don’t have, so maybe it’s time we offer ourselves that which we would want others to give us.

For the past month or so, I’ve been calling, writing, and seeing people I haven’t spoken to in too long a time and reconnecting. Relationships need tending. They don’t grow and deepen without effort. This is another way we heal the world - by growing our connection to one another.

I’m taking an extra few seconds and going out of my way, whether it’s in the grocery store, reaching the top shelf for an older person, or holding the door at the post office, or telling as many people as I can something I love about them, be it an article of clothing or their soul.

This season, I’m staying present to the gift of now and the fragility of life.

It is time to stop making a mess of everything and then ask someone else to clean it up. That is childish and we are not children.

It is time we stop longing for peace on earth, good will toward men and finally realize that only we can be the deliverers of that.

We can be either the creators of each other’s pain or the creators of our healing.

‘Tis the season to heal. To show mercy and kindness. To be compassionate in the way we ourselves need compassion.

Loving one another – yeah, that would be a modern day miracle.

We don’t have to watch It’s a Wonderful Life to know what the world would look like without us. It would look like it does now, when we’re here, but not participating.

So let’s participate.

This is the season of miracles, and we, my friends, are the miracle workers.

May your days be filled with the miracle of love, kindness, and compassion that you are.

Thanks for stopping by. Please tell your friends.