Tonight I was forced to take a break from work, so I decided to make use of my unexpected free time to create a Facebook page for my book. (http://www.facebook.com/quantumchristianity). I'm hoping that this will help draw me into contributing to it and this blog regularly instead of rarely and that the addition of social media to the mix will make it easier for us to keep in touch.

Mundane miracles

Today in the Adult Christian Education class I was teaching, we were talking about miracles wrought by Jesus as recorded in the Gospel of Mark. One of the sticking points was whether an event had to be unexplained in order to qualify as a miracle. My response to that question was that requiring a miracle to have no explanation is that ends up turning God into the "cause of last resort," the God of the gaps who exists only in the gaps of our understanding.

To me, a miracle is an event that may or may not be able to be explained in scientific or other terms, but that has meaning to me as a sign of God's presence and activity in my life. I can explain fairly readily how my children were conceived, gestated, and born (despite the lack of sex education in the schools I attended). But it's still a miracle to me that God gave me such wonderful, loving, kindhearted, and downright adorable kids who enrich my life in so many ways. The fact that I can describe the mechanisms by which that took place only adds to the sense of awe that I have when I contemplate these miracles in my life.

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum phenomena, the observer plays a crucial role in the unfolding of an event. For me, the same is true of the events in my life: I observe the events around me as miracles, not just random events with no meaning. A miracle is a miracle because I say it is, because I see God at work in every event, no matter how miniscule, no mater how common.