Marvels and Miracles

Ive been going thru a period of a lot of introspection, and thinking about Life So Far and some of the things that have happened during it.

I think I’ve decided that the Big Question isn’t “Why was I so incredibly screwed up as a kid?”, but “How did I manage to end up so [relatively] normal?”

I don’t like miracles. I don’t want to believe in them. It’s why I’ve never been able to be a Christian; if God performs miracles, then God is a cheat.

But I look back at over a quarter-century with Hilde, and I marvel. I marvel that when I finally realized that Hilde had an interest in me as more than a casual friend, that – in a life that had, up to that point, been close to emotionally comatose – I found the courage to take the risk of opening up to someone, of sharing myself with someone. (And I came so close to deciding the other way.)

And the other marvel: That the person I opened up to was the right person, maybe the only person who could have, in the simplest words, put up with me, to stand by me, and teach me during that long steep learning curve of how to be capable of love.

That’s definitely a marvel. And maybe it’s a miracle too.