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I have a friend who sees eye to eye with me on most important subjects: faith, responsibility, honor and what the all-time best line from a television show was (“I’m gonna need a hacksaw” – Jack Bauer, 24). But on one subject we disagree: magicians and magic shows.

He’s likes them.

I don’t.

Or at least I didn’t. My argument against magicians and magic shows is the premise. The audience understands that what they are about to witness isn’t really magic, it’s a series of illusions. Slights of hand and distraction created to fool you. In essence, I felt like you were paying someone to lie to you and to trick you. It never sat well with me, and I have held stubbornly to my stance on the subject.

I took an informal survey via Twitter and Facebook and asked others whether they liked magic/magicians, and why or why not. The majority opinion was that yes, they did. Many said they try and figure out how they pulled off the illusions, while my friend Helen said she didn’t want to know. She embraced the mystery. I still wasn’t completely dissuaded from my opinions on magicians and magic shows, but I was beginning to understand why many people enjoy them. The following is the most convincing argument for magic that I received:

“In a word, possibility. It’s like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. I don’t believe in their existence, but I believe in their possibility. I know it [magic] is an illusion. It’s always an illusion. But I also believe real magic is possible. Miracles are magic. And that sense of magic is something we just don’t have anymore.”

I want to believe in magic. I want to believe that miracles are still possible; that they aren’t relegated to biblical times. I want to know with my head that most magical things are illusions, but hold fast in my heart the hope that there’s a chance some are real. And so, I think I’ve actually changed my mind about magicians and magic shows. Which, if you know me at all, is a small miracle in and of itself. Do you believe in magic? In miracles?

In a Miracle (by Jonathan Butler)

I know you feel like letting go
You’ve suffered more than I could know
But if you’d seen the things that I’ve seen
Hold on my brother now,
It wont be long

Don’t think that He’s forgotten you
He’s by your side within you too
Through your worst fears
He’s right there
Waiting for you now
Waiting for you

He can make any desert bloom
In a heart like yours there’s room
for changes
and the change is coming soon
Don’t you know it’s just begun?
We’ll move that mountain with love

In a miracle

And all the things you used to know
Like skies of blue and fields of snow
With my hand on my heart
I promise they are
waiting for you now
waiting for you

He can make any desert bloom
in a heart like yours there’s room
for changes
and the change is coming soon
Don’t you know it’s just begun?
We’ll move that mountain with love

In a miracle

There’s no limt to
all the things He can do
Imagine what He can do for you
He’ll rescue you safe
from the prison of pain
and back to your life again

Tears bring Him closer
closer to you

He can make any desert bloom
in a heart like yours there’s room
for changes
and the change is coming soon
Don’t you know it’s just begun?
We’ll move that mountain with love

In a miracle

A Massachusetts native, Michelle DeRusha moved to Nebraska in 2001, where she found gargantuan grasshoppers, looming grain elevators and God. She’s raising two rambunctious boys with her husband, Brad; works part-time for Nebraska public television and radio; launders Sponge Bob briefs on a regular basis; and writes about finding faith in the everyday on her blog Graceful and in a monthly column for the Lincoln Journal Star.

***

“The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” ~ Virginia Woolf

I’m always on the lookout for miracles. The Bible, I’ve noticed, teems with them. A raving lunatic witnesses his demons funnel into a herd of pigs. People rise from the dead and start doing jumping jacks. Peter slides across a roiling sea.

It’s not easy for me to choose blessings, miracles, over mere coincidence. In twenty years of “unbelief,” doubt became my natural, instinctive reaction. Doubt was my default. So choosing to see the blessing, the miracle, has had to become a conscious choice, one I make each day.

This fall as I was watering the garden I suddenly heard my son Noah yell: “Quick, Mommy! Come here! Come here! Hurry!” his voice urgent, pressing. I walked over to take a look.

Floating on a gentle current along the tops of the phlox was a most curious bug, a miniscule creature about a quarter the size of my pinkie nail. To me it looked like a thin shred of paper; the kids decided it resembled a teeny piece of Kleenex. The insect bobbed along the bee balm for a bit and then floated over to my sons, navigating its linty body between them, as if to take a closer look at their big bauble heads.

My youngest, Rowan, named the bug “Klee Klee,” the word he uses for Kleenex. We sat on the curb next to the flower garden and marveled at the insect as it gracefully inched its way over the mountainous folds of Rowan’s tee shirt, its snow-white wings wispy and ragged.

I would never have noticed this delicate creature of course, so bent on watering the drooping coneflower and deadheading the bee balm, wrenching the ivy’s suffocating grip off the phlox and pulling the weeds. But the kids insisted I look, squealing and bellowing so persistently I was forced to tune in, if only to quiet the racket.

And when I did I was overwhelmed with gratitude and awe.

In her book Expecting Adam, Martha Beck marvels over her son Adam’s uncanny ability to teach her a fresh way of seeing. “He is constantly reminding me that real magic doesn’t come from achieving the perfect appearance, from being Cinderella at the ball with both glass slippers and a killer hairstyle,” Beck writes about Adam. “The real magic is in the pumpkin, in the mice, in the moonlight; not beyond ordinary life, but within it.”

Sitting on the curb with my two kids, awestruck by Klee Klee — the delicate ruffle of his body, the gentle tickling of his feet over the fine hairs on Rowan’s arm — I witnessed God’s way of illuminating the extraordinary within the ordinary. I uncovered real magic. I chose to see the miracle.

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To read more from Michelle DeRusha, visit her at Graceful and follow her on the twitter at @negraceful.