Albert Einstein once said that there are two ways to live — you can live as if nothing is a miracle or you can live as if everything is a miracle.
Like Einstein, we choose the latter.
Certainly, it isn’t difficult to find a miracle in a warm summer day — the sun’s rise, the morning’s dew, the leaf’s unfurl, the water’s splash, the child’s laugh, the breath’s whoosh.
These are the mundane miracles — oxymoronic, beautiful and universal.
We thank God for them every day,
This summer, like last, we also enjoyed the pleasure of a named miracle that happened, for us, once a week on a specially built baseball diamond just north of our house.
The Miracle League of the Fox Valley offers the simple pleasure of teamwork, accomplishment, pride, and acknowledgement to children with mental and/or physical disabilities. As I wrote about last year, everybody hits, everybody runs and everybody scores.
It’s a perfect game, every night.
As a volunteer buddy, Molly once again teamed up with her little friend Emily and the two, together with their Angels teammates and all of the other participants in the 16-team league, proved that the real miracle in baseball has nothing to do with the ’69 Mets.
It’s the clink of a braced leg rounding third base and heading for home, the happy cheer of a child with cognitive challenges, the high-five of player and home plate ump.
We live in challenging times, when bad news trends easily and stress ferments in our hand-held devices.
What a delight, then, to pocket all of that for an hour on a sunny summer night and cheer a group of people just thrilled to be playing a game together.
Thank you, Miracle League, for another summer of pure joy.
