Hope

House of the Virgin Mary

A friend asked me the other day if I believed in miracles and I didn't know how to answer. That was until I sat down and thought about it some more. I hope you, my dear friend will read this because I've decided that I do. Miracles are everywhere. They are happening each day to us all and we fail to see them for what they are.

To me a miracle is meeting the people you meet at times of your life when you need them the most. I truly believe that what ever life throws at you you always are given the tools to deal with it and come out the other side a better person. I can think back over my life and see that. At each transition or struggle there was a special person that helped me, gave me the courage, the helping hand etc that I needed. I can only think of one time in my life that I felt truly alone, with no help that I needed desperately, but you know what? I am stronger for it.

I believe in a higher being. I'm not sure if it's god or maybe it doesn't really matter who it is that me or you believe in so long as we have faith in something. I don't know why I was alone when I needed that help. Maybe I wasn't and that makes me think back to a poem that used to hang in my Nan's kitchen about God and foot prints being in the sand. In the poem a man asks God why he left him in his time of need. He said that he couldn't see Gods footsteps in the sand next to him in his darkest moment and God replied that he had carried him and would never leave him. Maybe that explains it, I don't know and it really doesn't mater because I know that everything we experience, be it good or bad is for a reason. We may not know why, and we might never, yet I believe that when there is pain, there is art, that's what it becomes. It becomes beauty if we let it. Maybe by experience we can help someone else through theirs.

I also see a miracle in birth. It truly is a miracle that I have a part of me and my husband in my arms each night. Where did she come from? That's amazing to me.

I have also felt divinity. I was visiting Esphesus in Turkey and were going to a site that was supposedly the last resting place of the Virgin Mary. I didn't know what to expect of it. It was a little chapel that we were lining up to get into. It used to be her house and was reduced to rubble but the walls had been recently rebuilt and was now a church/ shrine to her for visitors to go and see. I walked in and immediately felt I could of dropped to my knees and prayed. Such was the affect of entering that room. I felt her pure love in that room. I felt her sacrifice. The air felt thick with emotion.

I've been to beautiful churches on my travels. St Peters Basilica, St Pauls Cathedral, The Blue Mosque in Turkey, and numerous others but none have moved me the way this simple sandstone dwelling moved me. Yes, they were all beautiful and had a certain sense of divinity but they were not miraclous. Could it be the final resting place of Mary? I truly don't know but I know that place had an affect on me. It made my world stop. I left the church and the air I breathed smelt fresher, the sky more blue, the flowers in the garden meant something more after that moment.

It's all the little miracles that we experience each day that mean something. They equal life. Why do we think we need a big miracle to happen to believe in ourselves, or that something or someone amazing is watching over us. We watch over each other. It's apparent in each of our daily struggles and in the fact that we survive them.

So that's what I would say if I was back in that moment when you asked if I believe I miracles. I would say that yes, of course I do. The fact that I was standing there with you at that moment is a miracle. Maybe me answering yes will offer you in this moment, what I have been lucky enough to have over and over in my life when I have asked for divine intervention...hope.