I love the way my old Pastor used to tell the story of Jesus turning water into wine. He really unpacked it. First off, Jesus hadn’t done a single miracle before then, which meant that for his Mom, Mary, to expect one was pretty bold. But when they were at a wedding and the wine ran out, Mary told Jesus to do something. And Jesus pushed back.

I imagine Jesus was like “MOM. Why are you putting my business in the street? Ugh.” I’m sure the way I imagine this has a lot to do with my relationship with my own son. 😀 But I fact-checked my memory of this story as I wrote this, and Jesus actually said “Woman, why do you involve me?” So, it’s not all in my mind. He really did push back. I just added the “ugh”.

Even after His resistance, Mary was like “Servants. Don’t even trip. Just do whatever He says.”

And the servants did that. And they had a bunch of large, empty stone water jars at the ready. Jesus told them to fill the vessels with water, which then became wine, which was so good that the wedding guests marveled at how the hosts had saved the best for last. (Note that usually the hosts would serve the best first, counting on the increasingly drunken state of guests to cover up the increasingly inferior wine they normally served as the night went on.) This became Jesus’ first known miracle. 

There’s one under-appreciated principle this story surfaces beautifully, the idea that you must create space for miracles to happen. Without the empty vessels, and the servants on standby, just waiting for Jesus’ word, there would have been no miracle.

I’ve found this principle to be true over and over again in my life. The more space I create for miracles to happen, and the more intently I watch for them, the more and more and more I spot and receive. And just like eating a bite of delicious bread begets the desire for more, delectable carbs, miracles beget miracles, in my experience.

Here’s what I mean. I’ve written about how I quit the best job I’ve ever had, and not because the job had grown terrible. I quit that job because (a) circumstances had changed so that the company and I were no longer aligned as to purpose, and (b) I needed to create space for miracles to happen in my life.

When you’re constantly overloaded in your calendar and overextended in your budget, the stress and pressure makes it easy to miss your miracle. When you have the practice of saying yes when you really mean no, you don’t allow space for those happenstance conversations, surprise opportunities, synergistic relationships and chance encounters that so often kickstart a miracle story.  When you chronically run on spiritual fumes and anxiety or are in a constant state of low-grade blahs, it can be hard to zoom out and stay clear on your true purpose.

In that myopia, it’s easy to miss the specific paths to the general reason you were placed on this planet, because they might not be where you are looking. And the miraculous ones are almost never where you are looking.   

I won’t belabor the point, because I think the principle is relatively simple. The practices that unlock the power of the principle just take practice, and a lot of it, because they definitely buck the trends of culture, and of the way most busy leaders operate.

But you’re not an ordinary leader. You are a conscious leader. So take that consciousness and use it to create some margins, some cushions, and some space in your life and your spirit. Let me be a little more specific.

Create little margins where you can of time and money. Get out of the practice of allowing or creating mini-melodramas of calendar or cash. Live more lightly than your income would allow. This might take years, but it positions you to not have to take jobs for money, which in turn creates a pause in which miraculous opportunities can burst.

Cultivate margins of wellness and joy, too. Practice mindfulness and build in joy-inducing experiences, intentionally, to your everyday routines and rituals. With this margin, you’ll be able to flex more powerfully around incoming challenges and circumstances and spot miracles instead of shifting into shut-down, fight or flight.

Do the work of healing traumas and emotional wounds, pulling out the triggers and spiritual thorns that outsource your peace and power to a memory or a trigger. Once you’ve cultivated this deep, unconditional state, you will have the superpower of being able to tune into what’s right and what’s wrong about relationships, projects and opportunities. Once your internal chaos is calmed, you’ll know that internal agitation is a sign that a project might not be the right thing, and that peace is a green light. You’ll be able to operate on a pure signal, and to trust that signal with your life and your life’s work.  

To be clear, each of the “create space” recommendations in the last three paragraphs is, in itself, a lifelong journey and can involve a great deal of inner and outer work. But the work bears fruit almost immediately. You’ll learn to detect and trust that signal, all along. And my experience is that your signal will often point you right in the direction of your miracle. But it can only point you there if you’ve created the space.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. But I wrote this post on Day 8 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.