Do miracles exist?
/What a great question posed by writer Joshua Gray in this guest post. Miracle making and leaping have a lot in common. They both involve your belief in what is possible. I hope his story here sheds some light on miracles happening in your own life.
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I am not going to get into a religious argument about the existence of God, but I do assert this: miracles exist.
However they don’t exist out of thin air or through divine intervention, they exist because we create them ourselves. Miracles don’t come easy; they require hard work and intention, but they do come.
Let’s take my life a year ago. Because of poor economic times my employer slashed my salary by half. I was unable to make my mortgage payments and my house was facing foreclosure.
Home owners everywhere were selling their homes at a loss. I had been looking for a new job for more than a year, with only two phone interviews and one in-person interview to show for it. My wife was in poor health and in charge of the entire family, including a special needs child. I was the sole breadwinner as well as a recent cancer survivor. Times were tough, but we were not special; this profile looked like many American families across the country.
We needed to create a miracle.
My wife and I focused on a vision, while at the same time considering alternative options (plans B, C, and D). We had been thinking about moving to India for many years, but never really felt like it was the right time. (Of course, it’s never the right time.)
Besides, I had been looking at IT jobs in India, with not even an e-mail reply to show for it.
Meanwhile my wife was looking into intentional communities, but the problem there was that we still had to come up with our own income, and sometimes we had to volunteer first. Then there was what to do with our children's education. Finally, as a lover of mountains, I wanted our next move to be away from city life somewhere in the mountains. There were just too many variables. But we were determined to see our vision through, while being careful to not to force any situation.
During the next two months what transpired was nothing short of a miracle.
My wife applied for a job she wasn’t particularly qualified for, in the mountains of southern India at an international boarding school, and she got the job. So much for employers during hard times not wanting to take risks on unqualified candidates. The school itself was an intentional community, per its mission statement. We received housing at no cost, and one of our two kids could receive a private education for free. She was to start work in six weeks time and we still owned a very cluttered house.
Despite advice to the contrary, we put our house up for sale by owner. Real estate agents would cost us and we wanted to get as much for the house as possible. I held three open houses, and only one family came to see the house in all that time. One. They put an offer on the house and not only did we accept it, we earned a profit instead of taking a loss.
Six weeks later, with the exception of a small storage space, we had either sold or given away all our stuff -- and we were in India.
From a house fly’s perspective, we did nothing different, nothing unusual.
Someone applied for a job and the house went on the market. But what we did have was the mental and emotional intention of creating miracles.
One does not have to be Jesus to create the miraculous, one only needs the power of intention and the will to see it through. All those variables were answered because of our intention.
The idea of intention seems silly. We can all intend to do something; that doesn’t mean it gets done. But your everyday variety of intention is based on doing, not being. It was in our way of being that shifted the power of intention. Instead of doing A so that we could be B, we were being A so that we could do B.
There’s this saying I heard once that I love: word creates world.
When we speak something out loud, it stops becoming a meme with no way of reproducing, and becomes a being all on its own, able to go out and procreate at will. What this means is our personal realities and goals exist simply by speaking them.
My wife and I spoke our intention out loud, almost like a mantra, and our word became our world.
The power of intention, or the law of attraction as it is sometimes called, does not mean everything will happen just the way we envision it; it doesn’t mean things will work out perfectly. But we have to let go of our fears and ideals and put trust in the universe.
Our family is not entirely happy with the way things have turned out for us, and so one year later we are shifting our intention once again. This is not to say that the miracle that transpired backfired, only that we have discovered a new set of goals and objectives in our lives.
What miracle did you create?
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Joshua Gray is a poet and freelance writer originally from the Washington DC area. He moved to the Western Ghats of southern India with his wife and two sons, where he is often visited by Indian Bison, monkeys, cows and neighborly dogs. Find him at www.joshuagray.