Ordinary miracles

In her book Amazing Grace: a vocabulary of faith Kathleen Norris writes of attending a Bible Study saying

When I dared to speak, I said that my favorite passage in the chapter had always been Mark 4:27, because it speaks so eloquently of an ordinary miracle: that the farmer "should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how." That seems to apply to so much that I do, I said, commitments that I make when I have no idea what I'm getting into, and somehow they grow into something important, before I know it. My marriage, for instance, and the women laughed, knowingly. It also reminded me, I told them, how mysterious are so many of the things that we take for granted. We know how to plow a field, and how to seed it. But germination and growth are hidden from us, beyond our control. All we can do is wait, and hope, and see.

"Only last Saturday," a woman interupted, "at the Lutheran festival fall bazaar, The place mat was real different. I saved mine. There was a picture of a wheat field and a quote from Martin Luther: 'If you could understand a single grain of wheat you would die of wonder.'"