Miracles are enigmas. We talk about them all the time, as in: "It's a miracle my daughter survived middle school" or "The Cubs are gonna need a miracle to win the pennant" or "It'll take a miracle to get through Thanksgiving without Uncle Harry getting smashed." For most of us, "miracle" is just a word for "something just south of impossible."

But for many, "miracle" is also a precious word conveying extraordinary acts of God, as in: Sarah getting pregnant when she was too old, Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus feeding the multitudes with a few loaves and fishes. Those kinds of miracles were big, so big that they became the cornerstones of whole religions. We are comfortable with those big miracles precisely because they are thousands of years old. They are recorded in elegant language in sacred texts we rarely open. Sure, we enjoy hearing about them on religious holidays, but we don't think anything like that could happen again. And certainly not to us.

It isn't that we don't want miracles. We want them, all right. We want to win the lottery. We want the cancer to go away. We want luxurious cars. We want perfect relationships. We want our debts to disappear. We've got wanting down pat. But we don't think any of that could happen — not really — so we relegate those wants to playful conversations that begin, "Wouldn't it be great if ... "

The truth is, miracles are available to anyone at any time in one of two forms. The first is a view of life itself as a miracle. Albert Einstein expressed this approach elegantly when he said, "There are two ways to live your life, one as if nothing is a miracle, one as if everything is a miracle." Think how beautiful life would be if each of us held that "everything is a miracle" perspective all day, every day. The world would overflow with love and joy.

I wish I could say that I always think like Albert Einstein, but I have to remind myself regularly that just being here on this blue planet is a miracle. I have to remind myself that the way my body works is a miracle, and my friendships are miracles, and my son is a miracle. Like everyone else, I slip all too easily into worry and fear. And that's when I need the second kind of miracle — the right-here, right-now, make-it-better kind of miracle.

I discovered how to induce miracles a few years ago when my life was a disaster. That's the really good thing about really bad things happening to you: You start to pray. Not an elegant, "Thank you for my life" kind of prayer, but the prayer of the terrified: "You have to help me and you have to help me now!"

This prayer works spectacularly. As "A Course in Miracles" states: "Prayer is the medium of miracles. It is a means of communication of the created with the Creator. Through prayer love is received and through miracles love is expressed" (Chapter 1, 1:11). Well, "I need your help and I need it now" is pretty clear communication. But it's not about the words you say. The words convey what you want, and in that sense it's good to be explicit, but the words themselves do not have any power. You could say the most beautiful words in the world, but they would fall flat to the ground without the robust energy that zings them straight to the heart of God.

If you opened those crusty sacred texts gathering dust on your bookshelf, and reread the accounts of those big miracles, you'd find they follow a formula. First, someone is terrified — usually the person saying the prayer, but sometimes it's the other people in the story. Second, the person turns to God and says something like, "Look, I know this looks impossible, but I need this and I need it now, so I'm asking." And then comes the essential part — the miracle-maker, so to speak. Once the prayer is said, the person does nothing more. This is key. Because the person knows God is taking care of it.

Need. Ask. Know. Those are the three essential parts of miracle-inducing prayer. Pick any miracle in your sacred texts, and watch how it follows the formula. Eventually, the person might be so tuned into God's loving power that he or she can give up the being scared part. Like Daniel in the den. He wasn't running around screaming. Or Jesus on the boat in a storm. The disciples were terrified, but Jesus wasn't even ruffled. But the rest of us typically start out good and scared before we turn to God in prayer, begging for a miracle.

So how come so few of us think our prayers are answered? How come so few can say they've experienced a miracle? Because of the third part in the formula — the "know" part. Jesus explained it rather clearly, but we either don't believe him or just can't quite figure out how to do it.

"If someone says to this mountain, 'Be pulled up and thrown into the sea,' with no doubt in his heart, but believing that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Everything you ask and pray for, believe that you have it already, and it will be yours" (Mark 11:23-24).

The big clue is: "Believe that you have it already." In other words, know that your prayer is answered. Know that the miracle is happening. And, of course, if you know that you have it already, you can't help but feel joyful, happy and blessed. The feeling of fear dissolves completely in the feeling of knowing.

If Bible-reading doesn't work for you, try this: Think of miracles as hamburger orders. When you order your cheeseburger, cooked medium, with cheddar cheese, grilled onions and extra tomato, and a large order of seasoned steak fries, you know the waiter will submit the order, the kitchen will cook it, and in 15 minutes or so it will be delivered to your table, hot and juicy. You know it. You don't have to check up to see if the waiter submitted the order. You don't have to go into the kitchen to watch over the cooks' shoulders and tell them when to flip it. You don't have to remind the waiter to go get your order. You probably don't even have to ask for ketchup. But when we pray, we doubt severely that the miracle is coming. We pester God endlessly about how the things are going. And we keep jumping up to do it ourselves. We tell God not only what we want but exactly how it should look and when it should be delivered. In all, we have a distinct lack of knowing.

Last Tuesday, I needed a miracle. A money miracle. Writing in my prayer pages that morning, I told God what I needed and wrote: "I don't know how you're going to do it, but I know you are, because you always have and you always do. I am safe and loved." I felt peaceful and happy. I went over to my desk to pay bills. I clicked on my online bank account to see how much money I had, and there, at the top of the screen, was a totally unexpected deposit. I smiled and said, "Thank You, God." I was happy, but I wasn't surprised.

(Next week: Voices)

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Janet Conner, S.E. (Spiritual Explorer), is the author of the Spiritual Geography series and is currently writing a book on the power of writing to activate the voice of God. The Spiritual Geography books are available through Amazon or Spiritual Geography. Reach Janet at {email janetconner@tampabay.rr.com}janetconner@tampabay.rr.com{/email}.© copyright 2007 by Janet Conner