In high school, my friend’s mom gave me a tiny pendant she had bought at a yard sale. Among boxes of chipped mugs and old records, she found the pendant that held an even tinier mustard seed inside it. On the back of it, in the silver setting, in writing almost too small to see, it read, “If ye have faith the size of a mustard seed, nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

I don’t think she told me why she gave it to me, and I never told her what it meant to me, but there was an understanding between us that it held a great significance. 

Since then I have moved dozens of times, across state lines, in and out of dorm rooms, back home several times, yet somehow, that tiny pendant stayed with me through it all. For a while I wore it on a necklace, but eventually the chain broke and so I kept it in my pocket or in a little bowl on my dresser. I’ve thought it was lost many times but then it would show up again, worn and a little duller than the shiny pendant it once was, but with the mustard seed still perfectly preserved inside.

Although I only wore the pendant around my neck for a short time, it’s message and what it has meant to me has stayed with me much longer. It is now safely situated in the home my husband and I built, on a knick-knack shelf that was once my grandma’s. Likely, it will stay there for the rest of my life.

 It has taken me a long time to get to where I am today and that mustard seed is almost like a reflection of my life. I doubt that the first time I held it in my hand I ever could have imagined where we would both end up, almost two decades later.

The relevance of the mustard seed has changed for me over the years. And honestly, I’m not sure, or at least I can’t remember exactly what it meant to me when it was first given to me, but something inside me told me to hold onto it, tightly. It wasn’t until I got sick for the first time, ten years ago (almost to the day) that I started to understand its real importance. It’s easy to give up and to believe you have nothing left inside you to go on, I have been there, more than once, wondering how and why and where I would find the strength to jump another hurdle. I’ve never given up completely though, there has always been something inside me that refuses to let go. Whether that hurdle is something with my health, my work, my personal goals or things I’ve wanted in life. Even if the hope I held onto was as small as a mustard seed, it was enough to keep me going.

Around the same time I was given the mustard seed pendant, my grandma passed away. She was, and still is, one of my favorite people in this world. On the bulletin board in the grandparen'ts house where their phone was (remember when phones were connected to walls?) she had written on a small piece of paper the first stanza of an Emily Dickinson poem:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

These words have stayed with me a long time. So much so, that I had them tattooed on me a few years ago so I would never be able to forget them, so they would always be there, as a reminder.

 Their meaning to me is similar to that of the mustard seed. No matter what, you hold onto that little bit of hope or faith, even when you think you’ve reached the bottom and there's no way back up, you hold on to that inexaplainable thing inside you that reminds you that nothing is impossible.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Chance the Rapper lately and in a couple of his songs he says, over and over again, “Are you ready for your miracle?” And although hope/faith aren’t automatically connected to miracles they really do seem to go hand in hand. People often think of miracles as these huge moments in life, these almost impossible feats, but they can also be small, often overlooked experiences. 

Something like getting sick and having to go into the hospital is rarely, if ever, seen as a miracle, but how often do we recognize getting better and going home as one? Maybe sometimes we do, but we can also take these small miracles for granted.

My friend Vicki needed a big miracle at the end of her life, one that she never did get. But her life was FULL of small miracles that she never once took for granted. If you are really lucky in your life you’ll get a big one, and if you’re even luckier your life with be saturated with tiny ones. They won't always be obvious and you may not even recognize them as miracles until days or weeks or years afterward, but if you're open to them, if you're always ready, they'll find you. Sometimes you'll have to look really hard to see the miracle that has grown from the mustard seed that you’ve held in your hand for so many years. Sometimes, if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it altogether. But keep your eyes wide and your heart open and you’ll start to see them all around you.

 

 

 

Erin Evans is 34 and has Cystic Fibrosis. She is the Program Coordinator for the CFLF as well as the coordinator for the CFLF Blog. She lives with her amazing husband and ridiculously cute dog in Vermont. To contact her with comments or to volunteer to write a blog for the CFLF, you can email her at: erin@cflf.org

 

 

 

 

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