The magnificence of small

I had a low-electronics high-outside weekend. It meant I had to stay up to midnight last night getting things ready for this morning and that I woke up with a decent (but subsiding, so no worries) headache. I actually feel really good about how much better I've gotten over the past six weeks at riding the waves of living. Granted, the waves right now are small in my little world. Manageable. There are really big tsunami-sized waves in the bigger world that aren't really my job other than to be ready to deal with the impact when/if they arrive in my own little life. But learning to accept my little waves is a good start at being ready for any waves, right?

 

I was thinking, on a bike ride, about how when I was young, I assumed my life was going to be big. I guess I thought I would be "important" in one way or another. Then the reality is that while I am very important to a smallish number of people in a local sort of way, you could also turn that around and say that I'm just your ordinary suburban English teacher--sort of a nobody from nowhere.

 

And then I look at trees budding and ride my bike in the slanting late afternoon sunshine and notice the day on which both the spring frogs and the summer frogs are making their music. There is a moment when my daughter panics because Mother's Day is so close and a moment when my son waits for everyone to finish their s'mores before he goes inside to retrieve a sweatshirt so that he can put away the marshmallows at the same time. 

 

I reworded my vision for myself this weekend. My life might be smaller than I thought it would be, but it's also more precise. The moments are tiny, but they are like those teeny pictures painted on grains of rice or like snowflakes or butterfly wings when you magnify them: small enough to throw away, to miss entirely but, if you look closely, every bit as beautiful and miraculous as anything else in the world.

 

Small, I decided, is also OK. No, more than that. Small is also valuable. Worth slowing down to look at closely. Worthy of reverence and gratitude and awe. My existence looks and feels smaller than I had dreamed, but if examined carefully, if magnified and admired with a sense of appreciation for the endless capacity for life to be more and more magnificent and complex the closer one gets to the details that make up reality, scale reveals itself as irrelevant. 

 

I was reminded of an idea I read in an L. M. Montgomery book (I believe it’s Rilla of Ingleside, if you’re looking for a good piece of historical fiction): in order to be infinitely great, God must also be infinitely small. A God that sees only mountains and celebrities is limited. A truly infinitely large, omnipresent God must also know the microscopic organisms that live in streams, must see the trajectory of every single rain drop, must care as deeply for a fragile baby (even one born in a barn, an expendable subject in a mighty empire?) as for world leaders and sports stars. A truly infinite God must, it seems, care deeply about even the small ripples of my life. And so shall I.