Love The Small Things

The ball rolled in from 75 yards for an eagle!

"Who dares despise the day of small things?"(Zechariah 4:10)


Gotta Love the Small Things: The temptation - when choosing a Big Picture blog title such as "The Life-Charged Life" - is to be too selective with my anecdotes, to routinely skip the everyday stuff, and to go directly to the oversized stories as a matter of course. However, the real power of the life-charged concept is the understanding that even the small stuff - maybe most especially the small stuff - is loaded with rich layers of meaning and irrepressible life.

Saturday morning, before I went to the church for the first leg of our big birthday bash, I played in a charity golf tournamentorganized to benefit  a local homeless ministry. Half my team didn't show up, so it was just me and a local doctor playing best ball.

We were on fire! I couldn't miss a fairway, neither of us could miss a putt. We were six-under after eight holes and finished in third place with a 63. Not too shabby. But the signature moments were two shots I hit in succession that I couldn't repeat if I tried a thousand times.

• First, I holed out a 75-yard lob wedge for an eagle on the par-5 16th. We whooped, hollered, and generally danced a jig around the golf cart.
• Then I walked over to the next tee-box, complained that the "over-the-lake" par 3 had been moved back to 185 yards, promptly stuck my 6-iron five feet behind the hole, and then watched it spin back before stopping two feet shy of an ace.

Yes, I won "closest to the pin", but the real prize was what I learned about "The life-charged life."
You see the truth is, I'd have enjoyed the game just as well if I'd missed the green entirely, dropped the two successive shots in the water, and led my team to a last-place 85! My approach to golf is process-oriented, not results.

I think process is a key orientation for the life-charged life. It's not about waking up in the morning with something huge on your radar, angling for that special "charged up" experience, or being anxious if something monumental doesn't come along by lunch time.

No, God is in the small things. God redeems the small things. Bringing an open spirit and a willing heart to the most routine and mundane of tasks is exactly how life can't help but take root and take hold. We are called - I believe - to honor the small things. Big things... transformational experiences... serendipitous... emerge like those time-sequence photos of opening flowers when we nurture the possibility of light and life in the thousand small moments that define the substance of each day.

"Consider the lilies of the field..." (Matthew 6:28)
- DEREK