We Are Called to Perform Miracles

“No one of us is asked to save the world by ourselves. And yet collectively, the Religious Society of Friends is a covenant people charged with building the kingdom of God on Earth. This is not a small task. This will take miracles, and what I want to put forth today is that miracles do not happen when we declare them to be impossible.

Miracles come from reality. Reality is the stuff from which miracles are made.

When we’re open to it, God calls us to do things that may appear, at first, to be impossible. But as I’ve said, ‘impossible’ gets us off the hook. The same goes for, ‘we could do this if we only had a wheelbarrow.’ I mean, it’s okay to say that if you really do need a wheelbarrow, but if you don’t have one, you don’t get to spend the next twenty years lamenting your lack of a wheelbarrow. Find a pogo stick and get on with things!

We often ask the question, ‘What do we need in order to do this thing we’ve been called to do?’

But the better question is, ‘How will we do this thing with what we have been given?’

Miracles from come reality. They require a rigorous assessment of the assets at hand. Everything. The assets that are obvious, the assets that individuals might be unintentionally hiding, the assets that nobody ever noticed, even the assets that we’ve left behind someplace that might take a little time to go back and get. It’s a treasure hunt. It’s exciting. How do we get from here to there with what we’ve been given?

God doesn’t ask us to do things that are impossible. If something is genuinely impossible, then that must not be what God is asking us to do, at least right now. This is a fact. But too often, that fact is used to justify this kind of thinking:

1) What are the obvious assets we’ve been given?

2) What can we do with those things?

3) Therefore, what we are called to do must be something on that list.

And that’s backwards. The miracles I’ve witnessed have happened this way:

1) What are we called to do?

2) Wow, that’s a big thing. But if that’s what we’re called to do, we must already have—or be about to be given—everything we need in order to do it.

3) So what do we have, and how can we use it in order to do this thing?

Miracles don’t fall out of the sky. Miracles come from reality. Which means reality, though often very difficult, isn’t an obstacle to miracles. It’s the stuff from which miracles are made.“

— Emily Provance, 2018
“Miracles Come from Reality”

Today’s Invitation

Take your first step toward preparing the way for a miracle. Ask yourself, “What am I called to do?”

Query of the Week

How does your body help you connect to spirit?

How does physical movement change your spiritual experience? How do you prepare your body for worship? How does your spiritual life enhance your appreciation of the physical world?