I roll my trash can to the street every Wednesday night and when I go to get it the next morning, it’s empty. It’s a miracle. I know, I know, the trash is picked up a little after midnight, and the process is totally explainable, but to me, it’s a miracle. Life is full of such miracles.

Some will scoff at this and say that picking up the trash is not miraculous, but is a service we pay for and expect to happen. Yes, I agree, but how do you feel when you go out there and it isn’t picked up? You feel betrayed, deflated and worried. You were expecting the trash to be picked up and it wasn’t. I choose to see the process as a miracle.

In today’s world, there are miracles all around us, but we walk right past them and call them common. I choose not to. I choose to acknowledge them every time they happen.

I am still fascinated when I put a piece of paper in a machine in my office and it comes out of similar machine somewhere on the other side of the world. It’s a miracle. Again, I know it is explainable to someone, but to me, it’s miraculous. The same goes for e-mail, and smart phones, and on and on.

Some will accuse me of lowering the standards whereby a certain event is judged a miracle. I disagree. I am not lowering anything, but elevating many things that we have denigrated to common status. The same people will say that if there is a reasonable, scientific explanation for something, that it is no longer a miracle.

At one time in human history, fire was considered a miracle, even a gift from the gods. When did it become less so? Just because I can create it and don’t have to wait for lightening to strike to have it, and can break it down into a series of chemical reactions, and explain their relationship, does that make it any less a miracle?

I see the birth of any creature, the blooming of flowers, the leafing of trees, rejuvenation of things long dead over the winter, as miracles. There was a time when someone asked how, or why, and set about to discover the mechanics of these happenings. That does not lessen them, but magnifies their miraculous attributes.

I’ll use fire again as an example. Fire is the result of sufficient heat applied to a solid or liquid carbon based fuel that is, by heat, converted to a gas, which ignites and produces more heat to sustain the process. The details do nothing to diminish the miracle, but serve to amplify or compound the attributes of an occurrence we consider common and show the deeper miracle hidden within. The understood process is a miracle within a miracle.

I am not going to list the things that I consider miracles. It would take too long, but we live in a time of ever-increasing miracles. They are everywhere.

What I want to do, and invite you to do with me, is to stop long enough to see the happenings in our everyday lives, and be reminded of what they are … tiny miracles heaped one upon another until we have the grandest miracle of all – life.

David Wilson Atwood is a local freelance writer whose human-interest columns offer a unique perspective. He may be contacted at david@starchasers.us.