Small changes in behavior, attitudes, and feelings, can, like the little pebbles, add up to another kind of miracle. Small miracles do build up and they can last.

Sue Bender

The last chapter in Sue Bender’s Everyday Sacred: A Woman’s Journey Home, “Small Miracles,” examines what it means to be a seeker. Bender reflects,”When I stopped waiting for something ‘significant’ to happen, and instead began noticing what was happening, not what I wished was happening, a series of small miracles occurred. . . . When I began to trust what I was doing even when it didn’t seem to make sense, when I understood that what I was doing was seeking, then what I was seeking was shown to me.” I am a seeker. I am curious to my core. I am a bundle of question wrapped in a body moving about the earth soaking it all in. I am empathic to a degree that can make seeking painful because my questions are always real and personal and human. That pain and overwhelm can discourage seeking. I can relate to getting so caught up in the quest for huge, amazing, gobsmacking wonder that I miss life’s small miracles. I can relate to the lesson of slowing down. I can relate to the beauty of making art out of broken pieces. Bender quotes Van Gogh saying, “I tell you the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

Finding the sacred everyday is more about inches than miles. It is more about a slow burn than major fire. It is more about gently placing small pebbles rather than moving huge boulders. It is about having the fresh eyes and an empty bowl ready to receive. It is about maintaining a soft heart in the midst of, and even perhaps because of, a cruel world. It is about, as Bender reminds, “What you bring to something – not what you get from it.” In the bringing, small miracles are about the why and the not yet.