A true Chrismas Miracle
published in the Boulder Daily Camera, 12/25/2020
Whatever your spiritual affiliation, the Christmas holidays are a time for thoughtful reflection on the world around us and the powerful forces that shape our very existence. You can’t spend more than a few minutes contemplating the wonder of life on Earth without being amazed by the many miracles that had to happen for us to get here.
To be sure, science has explained much of the path nature took to bring us life on Earth as we know it. Yet, even with what we know, going from a fiery ball to a primordial stew to a life form as incredibly complex as a single living cell was nothing short of miraculous. That a few billion years later, we get to humans living in the world today is even more astounding.
But here we are.
Maybe the Christian story of a miraculous child’s birth is enough to spawn all these deep thoughts or maybe it’s just because it’s cold outside and gets dark in the early afternoon leaving us with lots less time for action and more time for contemplation. Whatever. Christmastime and the winter solstice make us think.
And what a year for thinking and wondering about what just happened. Before this year, most Americans alive today had not lived through a period of hardship like the past year has given us. Thanks to many past miracles, we’ve lived in a world of abundance. A hundred years ago, many people wondered where their food would come from. Today, we wonder why Amazon takes three whole days to deliver our gifts to our doorstep as we worry far more about getting fat than going hungry.
This year brought us back to Earth as we came to more fully appreciate our mortality in the face of an unseen yet ever-present killer. A few days in March turned our world upside down. At that moment, it was hard to envision how we could work ourselves back to a normal life in less than a long few years and without watching many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our loved ones die painful deaths. In a world where we grew up learning to solve problems to alleviate suffering, we saw no way out.
We needed a miracle to get us back the lives we remembered from all the way back in 2019.
And, thanks be to God or whatever forces are driving us forward, we got one and just in time for Christmas. We found a way to slay the dragon that was killing us and to put an end to our misery. The light at the end of the tunnel didn’t just appear, it was brighter and more promising than we could ever have hoped.
The miracle was built on the backs of millions of years of human evolution and a thousand years of scientific inquiry and rigor. In a few short weeks in January, a small group of scientists sequenced the COVID-19 genome (whatever exactly that means) and, a few weeks later, a bunch more said, “hey, let’s try something different” to put this dragon down.
Thanks to the many past miracles that now allow us to watch science change the world in real time, we all had ringside seats to watch these amazing people do amazing things, and not just the scientists. We also got to watch our leaders turn their faith in the scientists’ wisdom into an immediate global solution. A process that had always taken science a decade was done in a few months, tested in a few more, and then scaled up to bring the beginning of the end to the suffering of billions people worldwide. All in less than a year.
If that ain’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.
We’re still human and there will be lots of confusion, debates, a few setbacks, and more suffering that we still must endure. But we now have the ice spear that kills the dragons (you Game of Thrones people know what I’m talking about). All we need to do now is wait for enough of us to arm ourselves with a jab in our arms and the dragons that have been killing us in droves will go back into their caves.
2020 has taught us much about suffering, to be sure. But, in the end, 2020 has also shown us the power of the human spirit and the glory of life everlasting.
Whatever your spiritual affiliation, the Christmas holidays are a time for thoughtful reflection on the world around us and the powerful forces that shape our very existence. You can’t spend more than a few minutes contemplating the wonder of life on Earth without being amazed by the many miracles that had to happen for us to get here.
To be sure, science has explained much of the path nature took to bring us life on Earth as we know it. Yet, even with what we know, going from a fiery ball to a primordial stew to a life form as incredibly complex as a single living cell was nothing short of miraculous. That a few billion years later, we get to humans living in the world today is even more astounding.
But here we are.
Maybe the Christian story of a miraculous child’s birth is enough to spawn all these deep thoughts or maybe it’s just because it’s cold outside and gets dark in the early afternoon leaving us with lots less time for action and more time for contemplation. Whatever. Christmastime and the winter solstice make us think.
And what a year for thinking and wondering about what just happened. Before this year, most Americans alive today had not lived through a period of hardship like the past year has given us. Thanks to many past miracles, we’ve lived in a world of abundance. A hundred years ago, many people wondered where their food would come from. Today, we wonder why Amazon takes three whole days to deliver our gifts to our doorstep as we worry far more about getting fat than going hungry.
This year brought us back to Earth as we came to more fully appreciate our mortality in the face of an unseen yet ever-present killer. A few days in March turned our world upside down. At that moment, it was hard to envision how we could work ourselves back to a normal life in less than a long few years and without watching many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our loved ones die painful deaths. In a world where we grew up learning to solve problems to alleviate suffering, we saw no way out.
We needed a miracle to get us back the lives we remembered from all the way back in 2019.
And, thanks be to God or whatever forces are driving us forward, we got one and just in time for Christmas. We found a way to slay the dragon that was killing us and to put an end to our misery. The light at the end of the tunnel didn’t just appear, it was brighter and more promising than we could ever have hoped.
The miracle was built on the backs of millions of years of human evolution and a thousand years of scientific inquiry and rigor. In a few short weeks in January, a small group of scientists sequenced the COVID-19 genome (whatever exactly that means) and, a few weeks later, a bunch more said, “hey, let’s try something different” to put this dragon down.
Thanks to the many past miracles that now allow us to watch science change the world in real time, we all had ringside seats to watch these amazing people do amazing things, and not just the scientists. We also got to watch our leaders turn their faith in the scientists’ wisdom into an immediate global solution. A process that had always taken science a decade was done in a few months, tested in a few more, and then scaled up to bring the beginning of the end to the suffering of billions people worldwide. All in less than a year.
If that ain’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.
We’re still human and there will be lots of confusion, debates, a few setbacks, and more suffering that we still must endure. But we now have the ice spear that kills the dragons (you Game of Thrones people know what I’m talking about). All we need to do now is wait for enough of us to arm ourselves with a jab in our arms and the dragons that have been killing us in droves will go back into their caves.
2020 has taught us much about suffering, to be sure. But, in the end, 2020 has also shown us the power of the human spirit and the glory of life everlasting.