The Little Things ARE the Big Things

I was sorting through an old folder filled with speaking materials today and I stumbled on an article that a dear friend gave me years ago. Its corners are ragged. It’s words are a blurred gray rather than a crisp clear black.  It appears to be a photocopy of a newspaper column, but where the article first orignated, I’m not sure. I realize now that the author herself is an acclaimed novelist. But at the time of my first reading, I didn’t know anything about the writer except that she was a mother with an approach to life that I wanted.  Her simple words resonated in my soul.  Her appetite for joy humbled my tendancy towards drudgery. Her gift to her children was one I wanted to give.  Her honest pen planted the seeds of celebration in the soil of my life. And today, my children enjoy the sweet fruit. 

Perhaps the words will inspire you, too….

I remember what my mother used to say to me when I was very young and she was settling me down for the night.


“You need to get a good night’s sleep now,” she would tell me, “because, remember, tomorrow…”


And then, voice animated and eyes wide, she would tell me what we were going to do the next day. Big important stuff. We were going to get a new collar for the dog. Or, after school we were going to drive through the arboretum.


Now I’m wise to her trick. She was trying to get me to go to sleep without fussing. I do the same when I tuck in my children. Only rarely do I have anything momentous to promise for the morrow. Once in a while we’re going to leave early to go out of town. More often, I’ll say something like, “Tomorrow, we’re going to plant tomato seeds,” or “Tomorrow you can take your top to show your friends at school.”


It took me years to see that there as more to this than a soothing way to get children to give up one day in anticipation of the next. What my mother was doing was giving me something to hang my dreams on. She also was giving me the essence of her nature, which was hopeful.


For a long time, that wasn’t my nature. I spent years of my life waiting for what I called “the next big thing” to happen. I still do. But it’s a game. I’m not going to win the lottery or get summoned to Hollywood to write screenplays for Meryl Streep.


But tomorrow we are going to plant some new lilac bushes. I might get a long-awaited check in the mail. Those will be good things. This is what my mother gave me.


She gave me the sense to appreciate light traffic, spaghetti for dinner, a good book waiting upstairs. There always would be a jewel in the ordinary clay of work or school.


The Bible says that each day’s evil is sufficient to that day. What my mother believed, without being an overbearing Pollyanna about it, is that so is each day’s joy. There might be only a little- the look of the sky before a storm, getting all the laundry done- but there is something.
She sensed-and taught me- that the aggregate of all the little things is, finally, all we have. Big things don’t turn up often enough to spend time pining after them. Ordinary life is the big thing. She had the knack of appreciating it.


And that’s a knack we want to give our children early on. Every day is not going to bring a trip to the toy store or even a rental video. But every day will bring something, if you slow down long enough to look for it. Any excuse to celebrate, even the smallest, was good enough the way my mother reckoned it.
So even in the blackest periods of my life, there always was the chance something could turn out interesting tomorrow.


Our children are growing up in a difficult world. One of the most difficult things about that world is that too much is offered and too much is expected. As I tuck them in at night, I want to remind them, by holding out the smallest possible cause for joy, of a way to keep their boundaries manageable so the world will not crush them, so it will not take too much to buoy them up when they are sad.


Last night, my 7-year-old reminded me that, yep, tomorrow was the day we’d paint the handlebars on his bike. And so we will. And if my mother were still alive, I expect she’d want to help.

Today’s Treasure:  “This is the day that the Lord has made! We will rejoice and be glad in it!” -Psalm 118:24