The Sunday Letter
Misti and I spent this past week up in the Northeast, threading our way through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The weather could not make up its mind. We had sun and rain and low grey cloud and a few days of wind that came right down off the hills, sometimes all of it before lunch. We sat in tight, congested downtown traffic with our bumper a foot off the car ahead, and then an hour later we had nothing around us but wide open space, the hills and mountains running out farther than we could see.
The part I keep coming back to is Franconia Notch. We drove through with the mountains rising up on either side, and then walked the Flume and the Basin, where you do not just see the water, you hear it and feel it, the rumble of the falls coming up through the ground under your feet. It was the kind of thing that stops you. A reminder that we live in an amazing country, with God’s fingerprints all over it.
That is the thing about going away. You start seeing your own place more clearly from a distance.
The fingerprints are on the South too. They are just pressed into different ground. Not granite notches and cold rushing water, but slow brown rivers and live oaks and the heavy green hush of a summer afternoon. The North wears its wonder up high where you have to crane your neck for it. Down home it tends to sit closer, at eye level, in a marsh at low tide or a field of cotton going to seed. Same hand. Different country.
It is good to be reminded that the whole of it is a gift, every part, the part you are visiting and the part you are missing.
I will be home soon, and glad of it.
Until next Sunday,
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
“Who has despised the day of small things?” Zechariah 4:10
The prophet said it to people rebuilding something that would never match what they had lost. The new temple was smaller than the old one, and some of them wept at the sight of it, ashamed of how little they had to work with. The answer that came was not that the small thing would one day grow grand. It was that God does not measure the way we do.
We see this all through the life of Jesus. He was born in a stable, in a town too small to expect anything from. He spent His years with fishermen and tax collectors instead of kings. He said the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds, and that a cup of cold water given in His name would not go unnoticed. The God who made the mountains pays attention to the sparrow. Nothing offered to Him in faith is too small to matter.
So whatever small thing is in front of you this week, the one that feels too plain to count, offer it to Him. He has a long history of taking what looks like nothing and making it the very thing that lasts.