Do you ever feel super tiny?
Have you ever felt super tiny? Whenever I stare down from an airplane window to the sprawling cities below, I feel my relative insignificance. I remember that each home equals a universe of relationships, obligations, and emotions multiplied by an entire community unknown to me.
I feel it, too, when I end up in a remote, quiet location and admire the nature around me—the life cycle of flowers and wildlife that exists unknown except by the Father who causes all things to grow. And tonight, I stay awake late after our church’s vacation Bible school (VBS) because I can’t help but worship the One who sends the brilliant lightning after a hot week in the middle of summer.
In Zechariah chapter 4, God says, “Who dares despise the day of small things” (v. 10), and I know that God works on the scale of the phenomenal, yet also the microscopic. The thunderstorm brings a million individual raindrops and somehow it quenches the thirst of my entire flower garden. I think back to the little hands wanting me to guide them through the VBS stations, to dirty faces contentedly eating snacks, and to young voices loudly singing out the name of Jesus. And I marvel that God uses the little things.
I drove home on the final day of VBS listening to my daughter listing off the themes from past years and remembering a Sunday school teacher who taught her a verse that she has never forgotten. “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:3–4 ESV). What is man that you, Jesus, have chosen to suffer for our sins, then to fit us together as a body called your bride? I’m amazed that I get to pause my schedule for the five afternoons of VBS so that I can be a tiny muscle moving your body in service to these children.
I hope that when an account is given of my life, I can see that my tiny drop has watered where God has given an increase (1 Corinthians 3:6)! This week, among the fun and excitement, the precious, tiny seeds of God’s Word were sown, and we know that from a tiny mustard seed a magnificent tree can grow (Matthew 13:31–32)! I pray that I never grow tired of celebrating wherever God’s name is spoken because in these last days he has spoken through his Son and that is very good news indeed (Hebrews 1:1–3).
Perhaps I’m being overly dramatic by painting this week as being so significant. But, rather, I think that I’m describing one of those tiny houses seen out of the plane window. By itself, it’s easily numbered and accounted for, but alongside others it creates a spectacular urban landscape. A VBS in the life of a church is easily forgotten (alongside the third verse in the hymnal), but the adjoining events and divinely orchestrated appointments are working together according to God’s perfect will.
As I watch the lightning flash brilliant once again, I hear echoes of the “very good” spoken over creation followed by the “It is finished” at the cross (Genesis 1:31; John 19:30). As the storm moves along and the days blur into weeks, I think about how the “very good” and “it is finished” is culminated by God’s proclamation at the end of the New Testament. When I dwell on these verses, they motivate me to joyful service in the little things! “He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children” (Revelation 21:6–7).
Audio is generated with AI voice technology.
Photo credit: Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash
