Unlocking Your Miracle Mentality
To believe in miracles, to be open to the idea that wonderful things can sweep into your life, you don’t necessarily need to witness a scene like the one I saw in church that day. You can look at your own life and the lives of people you know. If we start to probe, I’m sure we can find evidence of the miraculous. I believe each of us has been anointed. I’m a Christian, so I use the word God to describe the Almighty, but all of the world’s major religions speak of the healing power of the supernatural. The Quran speaks in many places about the power of shifa, miraculous cures that Allah brings to those who have real belief in their hearts. The Torah discusses how miracles are evidence of the omnipotence of God. Buddhists profess that Buddha revealed his miraculous powers from the moment of his birth, when he took seven steps and proclaimed he was chief of the world. I’ve brought healing to people from every religion you can imagine—Buddhists, Muslims, shamans.
I believe the Miracle Mentality is innate. We are made in the image of God and—to quote Kendrick Lamar—we have royalty in our DNA. Through education, observation, and conversation, we all can draw out what’s already there. Unfortunately, many of us experience a lack of education, or a subpar education, and a scarcity of observation, and the wrong conversation. Subsequently, our Miracle Mentality is suppressed. For many of us, that’s called “life.” But if you put someone in the proper environment, if you work to change their perspective on the world—adding the right kinds of education, observation, and conversation—you can change everything. They’ll “discover” the power of the Miracle Mentality.
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I’ve determined that each of us lives in one of three states: mundane, messy, or mad. But we all want to live in the magical.
Magic moments aren’t preplanned. They’re miracles that deeply bless us and transform us. The Miracle Mentality is the state of mind that set the conditions for magic to happen.
In relationships, effort is required to maintain connection and intimacy. A common piece of advice is for the couple to go on a date once a week. Spending that time together on a regular basis will go a long way to keeping the romance alive. Why? The ritual of dressing up, going to a nice restaurant, giving compliments, and showing affection all set the conditions for romance to happen. If you want something special to happen, you begin by setting the conditions.
Mundane
The mundane is neither positive nor negative. It’s the neutral parts of life, the known quantities, the comfortable. But if you’re not careful, you will spend too much time in the mundane and not enough time challenging yourself, learning new things, and taking on new adventures. When we spend too much time in the mundane, we begin to settle where we are.
Mess
The messy as the undone things of life. The things that are unmanaged. Often a lack of order and problems go together. The reason: order manages the mess. There is a concept in science called entropy, which says that all matter in the universe tends toward disorder. Translation: when things are left unchecked or unmaintained, they get messy fast. That’s why we require constant care, good habits, and a desire to maintain order.
Madness
I grew up with a lot of madness and mayhem. We were a family without resources. My father had a tenth-grade education; my mother, a sixth-grade education. They had never been taught strategies to handle conflict, how to properly pay their taxes, or ways to keep the household in order. Another word for what happened in my house is drama. And if there was no drama, my mother would create it. Drama takes away your opportunities to go into that magical, miraculous side of yourself. You’re tied down, entangled in chaos and drained of your energy.
Becoming Magical
We are born with magical thinking, and it’s something we seek throughout our childhood. We pretend we are Superman and Wonder Woman because we recognize in them a power to make miracles happen. Usually the adults around us are the ones who drain the Miracle Mentality out of our system. In the popular TV show Dennis the Menace, Dennis was constantly getting into trouble because of his imagination and his creativity. His neighbor, Mr. Wilson, [was always] trying to force the boy away from his magical thinking. But boys like Dennis grow up to be Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates—people who think outside the box, who are immersed in a Miracle Mentality, never limiting what is possible.
We have the power to push ourselves out of mundane existence and escape the messy and the madness. All of us have the Miracle Mentality in our DNA, but we often have difficulty recognizing it.
Excerpted from The Miracle Mentality: Tap into the Source of Magical Transformation in Your Life by Tim Storey with Nick Chiles. Copyright © 2021 by Tim Storey. Used by permission of Harper Horizon.
