Waiting for a Miracle

Life is full of miracles.  I don’t mean the inexplicable things that are impossible and then truly happen, those things that saints have to do to earn sainthood.  I mean the ordinary things that happen regularly in life but seem miraculous.  Like spring.

Right now it seems to me that spring will be a miracle.  For those of us who live north of the forty ninth, the joy of winter is wearing off.  My pre winter mantra is “the more snow, the better”.  Well, I’m completely over that now.  Enough with the snow.  And this relentless chill is making me crazy.  I want to go out the door without layering up.  I want to hear the drip of the downspout, the bird reunion in the evergreens, I want to smell the earth.  I want to feel light again, and warm.  I am claustrophobic with silent white and icy air.  

So many of life’s moments are miracles.  All of those blurred years of child raising and the result: three young adult children who function in the world, kind and loving and generous.  This is miraculous to both Paul and I.  How did this happen, particularly when the two of us still feel we are waiting for our own grown up selves to appear.  It is a miracle, trivial but astonishing to me, every time a meal gets placed on the table for guests, without a serious explosion or some of it ending up thrown at the wall in desperation.  Is not every single birth a miracle?  Waiting those months while a child grows inside the womb and then, the waiting over, the miracle appears.  Does the waiting make it more miraculous?

Four years ago we met Jawad.  We waited with him until he was granted refugee status here in Canada.  One year later he found his younger brother, Naqib, which was a miracle in itself.  Now we wait for Naqib, his arrival in Canada and a grand reunion.  We are in limbo.  The more we wait, the more it seems that it may take a miracle to actually get Naqib to Canada.  He has had the interview, he is only waiting for the visa and the ticket “home”.  Everyday is another day to add to the months and months of waiting.  Sometimes his existence in our lives seems like a dream we once had.  Perhaps it is not real, maybe we have made this whole thing up.  Is it possible that we have invested so much of ourselves in a story?  But how do you explain the conversations we have every single morning across the ocean with this young man.  These hopeful, positive, trust filled talks about what he has done during the day that has just passed in Turkey and what we will do during the day that is just beginning for us here in Canada.  These are real conversations that always end with encouragement and hope.  We have read so many books together out loud, through an online app, each of us using our own tablet, unseen by the other.  Isn’t it time for him to be here, to hold a paper book across the table from us as we learn?  Isn’t it time for the light to come back, for the cold to go, for the ground under our feet to dry out and be solid?  We trust in the promise of a future we can’t quite see the details of.  We wait for miracles, for the miraculous.  We wait.