“On the miracle of love – Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle.” – Meditations From A Course In Miracles
The following words I repeated as a mantra: “…everything that comes from love is a miracle.” The picture had shadow figures on a freshly mown lawn that looked like two adults and one child. The adults, I assumed, were the parents.
This hit home for me. I have been working on some emotional healing but continue struggling with the emotional baggage of infertility. Almost five years ago, I became pregnant and miscarried at four weeks. I barely had time to wrap my emotions and dreams around the notion of having a child. Then, as if a wicked witch waved her magical wand (*poof*), it was gone. I was living in the moment. I think it was the first time in a long time that I had lived in the moment.
As I meditated on the miracle of love, the tears began to flow. Finally, I released my pain and prayed for more “emotional healing.”
When I lifted my head and raised my eyes, I saw the cup. It’s an iridescent, bone china tea cup with delicate gold-painted pictures of wheat and gold painted on the handle, the base, and the rim. My husband calls this his miracle cup. It fell from an open box in the cargo area of a truck. It bounced and spun until this lone cup, with its open end facing towards the sky as if to receive miracles from heaven, stood on the side of the highway.
This delicate cup should have shattered, but it didn’t. It should have fallen to its side as if spilling out its contents, but it didn’t. It could have settled with the open side to the ground, refusing to accept anything into this chalice, but it didn’t.
My husband felt compelled to bring this cup home during a yard sale weekend. I was trying to get rid of stuff we had accumulated over the years. My first thought was, “Great! More junk.” After my husband told me the story of this cup, I could not chastise him for it. I felt a tinge of guilt for calling it junk, though.
Now, this cup serves a purpose, and I told my husband we could place our miracles in this cup or even our wishes for miracles. So I wrote down my miracle and a wish and put them in that cup.
Then, I looked at names for the baby we had lost. It has been a difficult road in choosing a name. We had no idea of knowing what the sex of the baby was, but I believe that God guided me to a name today.
More like a nickname, our little one’s name is Sam. I chose this because it could be short for Samantha if the baby were a girl or Samuel if the baby were a boy. Now, it’s time to make a trinket with Sam’s name on it to finish my grieving process that I have stifled for the last five years.
And Sam was once our little miracle.
Stacy N. Elliott 