I was out front, watering the garden that runs along the white picket fence, when I heard my son Noah yell. “Quick, Mommy! Quick! Come here! Hurry!”
His voice was urgent, pressing, so much so that I stopped what I was doing and quickly walked over to where he was crouched at the curb. I bent down next to him, concerned that something was the matter, but he just pointed into the air.
Floating on a gentle current along the tops of the phlox was a curious bug, a miniscule creature about a quarter the size of my pinkie nail. It looked to me like a thin shred of paper, the handmade kind – bumpy, lumpy, pasty paper with bits of flower petals and leaves rolled into it.
The creature bobbed along the bee balm for a bit and then floated over to my two sons, navigating its linty body between them, as if to take a closer look at their big bobble heads. Rowan named the bug Klee Klee because it looked like the teeniest shred of Kleenex.
We sat on the curb next to the flower garden and marveled at the insect as it gracefully inched over the mountainous folds of Rowan’s T-shirt, its snow-white wings wispy and ragged.
I would never have noticed this delicate creature on my own, so bent was I on watering the drooping coneflower and deadheading the bee balm, wrenching the ivy’s suffocating grip off the phlox and pulling the weeds.
But Noah had insisted I look, squealing and bellowing so persistently I was forced to tune in, if only to quite the racket.
And when I did, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and awe.
I’ve spent a lot of my life looking for the big, flashy miracle – the billboard moment when everything is crystal clear and all doubts are washed away for good, the media-worthy miracle that makes the evening news.
After the Klee Klee moment, though, I began to wonder: What if?
What if these were the blessings, the miracles – these ordinary happenings in ordinary life?
Maybe, I mused, the blessings have been right here all along, right under my nose. Maybe God doesn’t always swoop in with the mighty and dramatic moments – the lightning and the earthquakes and the winds – but instead floats in gently, softly, almost imperceptively, on the wings of a Klee Klee.
It’s not always easy for me to see something as a blessing, rather than a coincidence. After twenty years of unbelief, doubt is a hard habit to break. Honestly, doubt is still sometimes my natural, instinctive reaction, my default.
Choosing the blessing, the miracle, over coincidence, has had to become a conscious choice for me. Again and again I dismiss doubt as the crutch that it is and embrace what for me, on some days, is a more challenging choice.
I embrace the miracle.
And the truth is, when I question my doubts as much as I question my faltering, toddler-step, wavering faith, I see miracles everywhere.
Even in an insect, floating on an air current through my own front yard.
This post is an edited excerpt from Michelle DeRusha’s recently published book, Spiritual Misfit: A Memoir of Uneasy Faith, which chronicles her journey from unbelief to faith. To read more about Spiritual Misfit or to purchase a copy, CLICK HERE. And don’t miss your chance to win one of five copies being given away on Monday’s post!
A native New Englander, Michelle DeRusha now lives in Nebraska, where she discovered the great plains, grasshoppers the size of Cornish Hens and God. She’s married to Brad, a man who reads Moby Dick for fun, and mom to contemplative Noah and rambunctious Rowan. In addition to Spiritual Misfit, Michelle is also the author of 50 Women Every Christian Should Know: Learning from Heroines of the Faith (releasing September 16, 2014, from Baker Books). She writes a monthly column for the Lincoln Journal Star and is a frequent contributor to The High Calling. You can connect with Michelle on Facebook, Twitter and on her blog, http://michellederusha.com.
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