When I was in labor with my first child, alone, without a doctor, without a clinic within reach, in a condition my father later described as ‘desperate’, a beautiful American truck arrived on the dirt road outside our house. To anyone watching from the outside, it was just a truck. To me, lying inside in pain that had lasted for hours, it was the hand of God in metal and wheels.
Fifteen minutes after the birth, after a complication that should have taken my life, after a prayer that should have gone unanswered, everything resolved. The baby was perfect. I was alive. And I said out loud, to the ceiling, to God, and to the silence that had finally broken open: “From this day forward, I know that God exists.”
What a Miracle Actually Looks Like
We have been taught to expect miracles in a particular form: parted waters, burning bushes, angels with trumpets, and gold light. And perhaps those miracles happen. But I want to tell you about the miracles that actually saved my life, because they looked nothing like that.
A miracle looked like a neighbor named Mrs. Rosa, God rest her soul, who shared her food so that I would not go hungry. A miracle looked like a polyclinic doctor who was humble and kind, who attended to me at 6 AM in the worst condition of my life, and who discharged me on December 16, 1997, alive and healing. A miracle looked like my sister Sonia, who loved my children as her own when I could not be there. Every single one of these ordinary-looking things was extraordinary. Every single one was grace.
“May this book remind whoever reads it that pain does not define destiny; that miracles sometimes arrive in American trucks; and that there is always, always, a new color waiting on the other side of rebirth.”
Hope Is a Practice, Not a Feeling
Most people think of hope as a feeling, a warmth in the chest, a sense of optimism, a sunny-day emotion. But hope in the way I have lived it is nothing like that. Hope, in the hardest seasons of my life, was a decision. A daily, exhausting, sometimes infuriating decision to believe that the next chapter could be different from the last.
There were many mornings when I did not feel hopeful. When the poverty was the same as the day before, when the pain had not lessened, and when the prayers seemed to evaporate before they hit the ceiling. And on those mornings, I practiced hope anyway. I got up. I fed my children. I walked to whatever farm or job or church needed me that day. I kept my face toward the future even when the future felt invisible. That is what hope actually is: movement toward something you cannot yet see.
The Miracle You Are Living Right Now
Here is what I want you to understand: you are already inside a miracle. The fact that you are alive today, that you have survived everything that has ever tried to end you, and that you are still breathing and reading these words – this is not ordinary. This is extraordinary. Survival is always a miracle. It just stops feeling like one when we stop noticing it.
When my son was born healthy and perfect after that impossible labor, after the complications, the fear, and the desperate prayers, the paediatrician told me it was a miracle. He did not say it lightly. He said it because he had seen the alternative, and my son was not it. I have thought about that moment many times since. The miracle was not separate from my story. The miracle was my story. And yours is yours.
“Look at your life carefully. Somewhere in it, a truck arrived on a dirt road at exactly the right moment. Call it what it is.”
— Luci Partela
