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.
