the great little things

strawberry

i was thinking this evening about the little things.  The little, potentially mistaken for unimportant, things.  it was the second blue of the day and i was doing dishes.. a lot more dishes than i would have had to do, had i not the tendency to put every single food item in the cutest little vessel i can find for the task.  We had baked potatoes tonight and as i came up with topping after topping as options, they each had to have their own cute little serving bowl, even the stuff that just came out of plastic-ware from the fridge.. some people may have just pulled back the plastic lid and popped a spoon in the ready-made "dish", but not me. Despite the fact i know it will create more dishes in the end, i don't care about that; i care more about the dining experience, and i think it's fun to make stuff pretty.  Don't get me wrong, there are nights when the spoon goes straight into the store bought container of whatever.. but not tonight.

So as i was tending to the "extra" dishes i was thinking again about how Abba-Yah understands this desire to make things pretty, even unnecessarily so.  i'm convinced by my experiences on earth that He goes out of His way to beautify, inspire awe, decorate, and dazzle.

Abba-Yah is the Mighty One - God of the grandest and greatest creation that includes the incomprehensible vastness of this universe; larger than anything we can even wrap our minds around.  And He is also the Mighty One - God of the tiniest, littlest and smallest parts too.. the microscopic world we've barely tapped into and hardly discovered.  He so clearly cares about the details, the nuances; nothing is insignificant, no thing too small.  i'm amazed by that which i cannot even see.. i mean scientists liken the nucleus of a cell to the activity and hub of a metropolitan city! Wowzers man.

And in all this pondering of the macro and micro of life, i decide it's important.  i want to care about the little things too.  It's easy to see and focus on big things, to be (if only fleetingly) concerned over injustice, poverty, pollution, society's trauma, and cancer; and to think that something like a pedicure means nothing at all, "in the scheme of things".  But to an elderly or disabled man or woman, bed-ridden and enduring the challenge and frustration of an ill-functioning body -- a body that may contain a mind as sharp as it ever was; to them a pedicure or other simple grooming might just be a little taste of heaven, a little dignity in an otherwise humiliating journey of decay and decline. 

Since we've gone there now, Let's continue down the rabbit trail and be honest and we'll admit that the elderly in our American culture are some of the most neglected of all our society. Sitting (rotting?) away in convalescent homes that are crowded and understaffed, caught in the fouled up and doomed welfare-by-force beast of a man-made system, where care and attention in the little things is so needed, yet unmet.  My own grandmother, who died in a convalescent home after becoming paralyzed, was at times found with feces under her nails by my mother who went to visit her just about everyday.  A little attention to detail means a lot from that helpless perspective. 

Forgive me, this wasn't intended to invoke anything but praise and a HALLELUYAH (!) that He, our Abba, notices and cares for the little things.  Not even the little sparrow dies unnoticed by Him.  What an amazing Father. 

So while a pedicure or a pretty dish may seem less important than countless other things, it's not, it's just not.  There's a time for every good thing. 

Yah help us.

Because the littlest things do matter. 

snowflake