God and Walnuts

Just so you know, I have a rant stored up.  I am convinced that Superhusband and I should be grateful hunter/gatherers and never own, title, tag, nor drive a vehicle.  But I’m going to put that aside for today.  I learned amazing things in worship today and I want to share.

 

When I worked in Houston, TX at a Christian school, several of my colleagues were from the same family.  They were a HUGE family who worked in different capacities around the building, but their main focus was providing janitorial services. Their patriarch was a stern-looking 4’11” man of square jaw and suprising strength for his frame. I have literally seen this man hoist stacks of lumber over his shoulders and walk up flights of stairs. He and his family kept the school clean, improved, structurally sound and full of amenities. (Unfortunately he was a bit of an opportunist when it came to materials and tools—if he could reach it, it was fair game.  Many’s a time I found 2X4”s from my theatre sets “repurposed” into bases for new locker units. None of us are perfect, eh?)

 

So, for a long time there, I viewed Mr. R as a wily janitor. I respected the man, but in a “blue collar” kind of way.  Then I was cleaning up in the chape-café-gymna-torium (that’s right, folks.  Chapel, lunch, gym class and school assemblies all took place in once cavernous area) one day, and he asked me to go to the maintenance room across the hall and see something.  His English was a bit choppy, so I didn’t understand all that he was saying, but the directive was clear.  Instead of pulling out something janitorially related, he totally surprised me by handing me a walnut shell.  Well, half of a walnut shell, to be exact.  After seeing my quizzical look he encouraged me to look closer.

 

As I drew the feather-light bauble up to my eyes, I saw more detail than is naturally in a walnut shell. There were seven tiny figures carved into the circumference of the shell like paper dolls: holding hands, looking inward, creating a tiny wooden merry-go-round in my hand.  Delicate as lace, graceful as snowfall. The magnitude and non-sequitur nature of the situation just about made me cry then and there.  Here was a man who was a builder, a janitor, a cleaner of toilets.  And yet here he was, standing amidst lightbulbs and machine oil, power tools and sawdust, giddy as a child to show me his walnut carving.

That is God.  Infinite power coupled with Infinite attention to detail. He created planets and honeybees. He dreamed up the Milky Way and the milk cow. He swirled the worldwide ocean currents and fashioned the swirls in my fingertips. That experience in the maintenance room in Houston not only changed my view of the janitor forever, but gave me a crystallized visual representation of the amazing bigness and smallness of our God. And isn’t He wonderful?

 

I was reminded of just this kind of juxtaposition in worship this morning.  We were shown pictures of Earth taken from billions of miles away. One included this quote by Carl Sagan.

            “Consider again that dot. That’s here.  That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you   know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their            lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of onfident religions, ideologies,          and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator          and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every       mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every      corrupt politician, ever “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the    history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

It is all just too beautiful.  In our humanness “bigness” usually comes with absence of detail.  (I used to work in a women’s plus-sized clothing store, so I can testify to this fact. Mu Mus do not come with intricacy.) But in God’s reality, the elephant is just as detailed as the fruit fly. So I am challenged to think of both aspects.  It’s probably going to give me headaches because my mind will be BLOWN, but I’m going to try anyway. I will try to understand that God is at once big enough to take care of every problem and natural disaster on the planet—or on every planet in every solar system at the same time, for that matter—and yet is so fastidious that He desires to perfect every single thought and impulse in my life.  He is the Builder who carves a walnut.