My friends mused aloud about which spiritual gifts they most wanted to exercise. One said he’d like to raise the dead. I thought that would be a marvelous gift.

As that thought passed through my mind, a vision opened to my view. I saw myself in scrubs, in the emergency department, defibrillating a pulseless patient and restoring circulation. In rapid succession, I saw myself doing it dozens of times throughout my career. I realized I’d been raising the dead for years. I’d just called it something else.

Is defibrillating a human heart scientific or spiritual?

At an 1864 drowning in Hawaii, a bystander responded to a voice he heard in his soul. He put his mouth on the face of the lifeless victim, blew air into his lungs and restored him to life. Medical experts in academic centers had described mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by 1864, but that man on a remote beach had never heard of it. For him, it was a spiritual experience.

Does understanding science make the act less spiritual? Does being commonplace move things from miraculous to mundane? 

As a man of science, nothing astounds me more than seeing two trillion human cells enter the world as a healthy baby. Worldwide, it happens 370,000 times every day. As a man of God, I consider it a miracle, every time.

Honoring the scientific need not dishonor the spiritual. Don’t let familiarity rob you of the miracles in your life. Sometimes, what seems mundane is truly miraculous.