The Gift of Tears

Joy leaked from my eyes this morning for the first time after today's doctor visit.

With each drip of the happy tears, I felt overwhelmed by the miracle of my living, belittled in the greatness of what God had accomplished.

When we say miracles do not happen today like they once did in the Bible stories;

that fairy-tale-like talk of parting seas and feeding thousands with a few loaves of bread;

we are missing something.

We miss what our eyes fail to see these days: the miracles all around us,

masked in our cynicism

clothed by the tired attitudes

we shield our hearts with as disguise the fleeting moments of wonder that stitch this life together, calling them things like,

"mundane,"

"boring,"

"ordinary."

My  miracle came today in the form of a blood test that acknowledged the return of health and nourishment to my bloodstream after housing a drought from these simple nutrients which allow my body to live.

My miracle came in the realization that my bones no longer stuck out at me when I gazed at myself in the mirror, when they once pointed at me like daggers threatening inevitable death.

My miracle arrived with the flowing gifts of rational thinking that come with a brain being fed by a healthy diet, and acknowledging that God had made me a warrior equipped with the weapons to defeat the disordered thoughts that try, and will eventually fail, to break through my armor every now and again. 

My miracle was the ability to share in those happy tears with the one who fed me my "medicine" of food: a mother whose love goes beyond the expanses of what I deserve or could ever imagine receiving.

We drove home from the hospital that day laughing at our spurts of emotion, and as the real world passed by with each wheel turning, the same world I viewed on the way to the hospital, I could not help but feel like I was in a different reality.

One where anything is possible. That was the moment I felt the truth settle in and call my soul its home.

That was the greatest miracle of all.