Sermon Illustrations
Think You've Never Witnessed a Miracle? Think Again
In his book, A Million Little Miracles, Mark Batterson believes we’re walking through a world brimming with the miraculous—we just don’t have the eyes to see it.
“There are miracles happening all around us all the time, hidden in plain sight,” Batterson says. “If you miss them, life can become a little bit of a chore and a bore. But if you rediscover the miracle that is life, it takes on a different dimension.”
It’s not just the big, cinematic miracles—the Red Sea parting or a blind man seeing. It’s the fact that we’re currently spinning at 1,000 miles per hour on a planet hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour, all while our bodies conduct trillions of biochemical reactions every second.
What if the real problem isn’t that miracles are rare—it’s that we’ve trained ourselves not to notice them? Psychologists call it “inattentional blindness.” If something is constant—like the sun rising, our hearts beating, or our lungs breathing—we stop paying attention to it. Batterson explains, “We should be startled by the sun, not the eclipse.”
The same is true of our own bodies. Batterson says:
Right now, you have 37 sextillion biochemical reactions happening inside of you. Your heart will beat 100,000 times today, pumping six quarts of blood through 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries—that’s twice the circumference of the Earth. And yet, we go about our day saying, ‘Well, I’ve never seen a miracle.’ With all due respect, you’ve never not seen one. In fact, you are one.”
So how do we start seeing the miracles around us? Learn to take nothing for granted. To wake up each day and marvel at the ordinary. To stop waiting for the grand, spectacular moment and realize that the spectacular is happening all around us, all the time. And maybe, just maybe, if we start paying attention, we’ll realize that life itself is the miracle we’ve been waiting for.