When I was growing up my family of six shared a two bedroom house on a corner. It was the first house my parents ever bought. The basement flooded every spring when the rains came.
For a time all four kids shared one bedroom, but we made more space in an unfinished attic when we three girls needed some privacy. The trees were decimated by a disease soon after we moved in and years later we got four new trees from the church to repopulate the town’s arboreal pursuits. Those trees were only about ten feet high when we moved down the street a few years later.
Over the summer, Mark and I made a pilgrimage to my old homestead to check up on those trees. I had regaled him with all kinds of stories about my life while we lived in that house. As we drove through town I kept saying, “Boy, it’s a lot smaller than I remember.”
Mark just smiled. The streets didn’t look right. They were barely wide enough for two cars to get through, even the ‘big’ street I used to be afraid to cross. What’s going on here? Then we turned the corner and approached my old house. Oh my! Did it look small! Those trees were humongous! Beautiful, full, richly-leaved trees! But the house looked pathetically small. Or was it quaintly petite?
In a world where bigger is touted as better, we need to see the value in small things. Houses, cars, packages, serving sizes (supersize, really?), and decisions. Small decisions are made every day. What will we eat for supper? Who will I play with at recess? Should we help out at the soup kitchen?
Small decisions can be life-changing. My decision to be a missionary at the tender age of 5 has turned out to be an enormous thing for a lot of people. It brought me to the man I would marry. My children have a different perspective on the world because they were raised overseas. My family has had to learn how to make international calls and track the weather and time difference for a small country they knew very little about. Our friends have been educated about a people group and religion they hadn’t been aware of before. My small decision grew up, filled out and created a deeply-rooted story in my life. And you know what? It’s not really smaller than I remember. The seed was planted long before I knew anything at all. God is like that. He knew what it would grow into.
What decisions have you made that seemed small but turned out to be big?