Book review Mark Batterson, A Million Little Miracles, Multnomah, 2024
Reviewer: Mary Lou Codman, PhD, Pastoral Psychology, Psychological Anthropology, Christian Education, Buddhism
Date: April 8, 2025, 4 stars
Soundbite
Our frame of reference, when it comes to God, always falls short. It’s a cognitive bias called narrow framing, and all of us are guilty as charged. The television screens, computer screens and smart phone screens that we stare at all day, every day, aren’t helping. Smart phones aren’t making us smarter. All too often, those digital devises are distraction devises. Most of us spend more time gazing at screens than we do stargazing, and then we wonder why we lost touch with the Creator. (Mark Batterson, A Million Little Miracles, Multnomah, 2024, P.5)
Review
Mark Batterson wrote his newest book A Million Little Miracles to help people recognize the miracles that continually surround everyone in everyday life. Feeling that too many people live anesthetized to the greatness, the closeness and the goodness of God, the book contains a million little facts that illustrate God’s miracles in mundane life. However, the end result hit the reader like rapid fire bullets from a machine gun. The sheer plethora of these examples actually muddy, not clarify, his meaning. Batterson’s strength in his former books was a solid narrative that held cohesively together around his opening story. In this book his efforts for readers to recognize and draw closer to God lose their staying power in memory as he flits from one example to another. 4 stars
Excerpts:
We praise God for anomalies and epiphanies, as we should. If you learn to discern the miraculous in the mundane, welcome to wonderland. (p.xi)
In Part I, we’ll go outside, look up, and count the stars. We’ll pull out our telescopes and do some stargazing. We’ll start with a two-foot field trip that takes our man made ceilings off Almighty God. The goal is rediscovering the God who is bigger than our biggest problem, bigger than your biggest mistakes, and bigger than you biggest dream. Even when you feel like you’re a day late and a dollar short, it’s never too little and it’s never too late. God is always writing a bigger story. (pg.xx)
The key to spiritual growth is routine. But once the routine becomes routine, we have to change the routine. It’s the law of requisite variety. If you do the same set of exercises in the same sequence every time you go to the gym, it loses effectiveness. Why? Because your muscles adapt to the routine. You have to confuse your muscles by changing routine and the same is true of spiritual muscles. That’s why I read different translations of the Bible very year. . .why I pray in different postures. . .why a change of scenery can be so transformative, “Change is endlessly fascinating to brains,” said Will Storr in his book The Science of Storytelling.. . .It has to involve some degree of ambiguity, incongruity, or novelty. This is why new revelations tend to happen when we change our routine. A small change can make a big difference! I live by the little formula: change of pace +change of place = change of perspective, (pp.16-17)
Did you know that when you exercise, your muscles secrete chemicals into the bloodstream called myokines? Known as hope muscles, myokines are so small they pass through the blood-brain barrier and function as an antidepressant. Your muscles are a built-in pharmacy and exercise fills the prescription. According to a UCLA study, those who exercise regularly experience 40% drop-in poor mental health days!(p.17)
[God said to Abram] “Count the stars if you can.” Taken literally, this would rank as the hardest command in Scripture. Remember, thee are 200 sextrillion stars in the observable universe. If Abraham counted one star per second for 5,ooo years, he’d only be on 157,680,000,000. Besides that, an estimated 275million new stars are born every single day! So, Abram would be further behind than when he started. I know these numbers seem ridiculous, but that’s the point. God is “able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine. And not by a little, but by a lot. (p20)
The feeling of awe is one of God’s greatest gifts and comes in lots of shapes and sizes.. . .”Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world,” said professor of psychology Dacher Keltner. It’s a paradigm shift. It’s a feeling of smallness in the presence of greatness. (p.25)
One of my favorite words is neoteny, Neoteny is the retention of all those qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy.(pg.34-35) [They are part of maintaining youthfulness into adulthood. And being open to see and experience God’s miracles]
When was the last time you clapped for the Creator? When was the last time. you gave God a standing ovation? The angels in heaven never stop! (p.50).
Prayer is the difference between the best we can do, and the best God can do! Prayer is the way we write history before it happens. P.55
“The purest and most thoughtful minds,” said art critic John Luskin, “are those which love color the most.” Color is one of God’s greatest creations! I have a little book in my library titled Children’s Letters to God. One of my favorite letters was written by a young boy named Eugene: “Dear God, I didn’t think orange went with purple until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday.” I seconded the motion, and I doubled down on the majestic pinks and magnificent purples of a Grand Canyon sunset. Those colors are precursor to what we will witness with glorified eyes in heaven.(pp.105-106)
Tears aren’t as simple as they seem. If you put tears under a microscope, they look a little like snowflakes-each one different from the next. There are basal tears that lubricate the eyes and reflex tears caused by irritants like onions. There are emotional tears-happy and sad- that have extra ingredients. All tears contain water, lipids, glucose, mucin, lactoferrin, lipocalin, lacritin, immunoglobulins, urea, sodium, and lysozyme. But emotional tears include stress hormone prolactin and a natural painkiller called leucine enkephalin. It’s another one of those microscopic miracles that remind us of how fearful and wonderfully we’re made. Whether we’re grieving the loss of a loved one or shedding tears of joy, each tear is uniquely precious to God. (p.129-130)
It’s not just knowing the names of God that transform us, it’s trying them on for size. (p.148-149)