Appreciating the Small and the Now

“The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.”
– Jon Kabat-Zinn

When I was a young man, I think I lived day to day waiting for the “big thing” to happen. I raced to the mailbox at the end of the day (imagine relying on such an antiquated source of information and news!) to see what it might hold for me that might change my life — a  letter from an editor wanting to publish something I’d written or a breakthrough song, perhaps, one great hit to be recorded by the likes of Garth Brooks or Tricia Yearwood.

I don’t necessarily think that was wasted energy or ambition, for it likely pushed me to keep writing and keep trying, but what I learned over the years is that such big ambition might have blinded me to the power of all the little things happening in my life. I learned to define success on different terms, with an eye toward how God was working in my life and how I might be working in the lives of others in small, seemingly insignificant ways.

If I only defined success in terms of how many books I sold or how large the circulation of the magazine that published my work, I might have grown disappointed in myself and in my work. I might have just stopped writing because it wasn’t big enough. I might have thought it was insignificant that a person wrote to tell me how one short 200-word reflection gave her the courage to get out of bed and find solace in her faith in the midst of difficulty. I might have missed that.

If I only defined success in terms of royalty statements and gold records, I would REALLY would have been disappointed and would have put away my guitar many years ago. But I would have missed the camaraderie of my musical partners and bandmates, cramped in my basement rehearsing so we could play for a handful of people. I would have missed writing songs that have challenged me and a few others to live lives of faith and that have been used to help celebrate baptisms, weddings and funerals. Small events, a few people. But in offering these creations freely from what I received freely, they became bigger things in that moment, at least for a few people. I might have missed that.

Like many, I was impatient and restless as a young person. My favorite prayer was something along the lines of, “That was fun. What’s next?” What I learned as I grew older was the importance of savoring the gift of the present and the little. Last night I held my granddaughter Laney when she awoke crying and sang her the old folk song called “Hobo’s Lullaby” that I sang to both of my kids years ago: “Go to sleep you weary hobo, let the towns drift slowly by…”  (often attributed to Woody Guthrie but written by a man named Goebel Reeves). I was struck by the power of that moment because it was small and quiet and no one else witnessed it, and yet it crossed generations and originated with someone who would never know its impact for me and Laney right at that moment. She fell asleep before I got to the second verse, but I kept singing, more for me than for her.

What we learn as we grow older is that maybe God does have big things in mind for us and we need to be ready if they arrive. We need to be as prepared as we can be to grasp the reins and take charge if they do, accepting the challenge as both a gift and an opportunity to do big things with what God has given. But we also need to accept and savor the small moments because they are far more numerous and are really not small at all. We don’t get to define the impact we make, we just have to do the work and recognize the moment and the movement of God within it. Or as my fellow St. Louisan T.S. Eliot once wrote: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Some may see all this as giving up too soon and not trying hard enough for the big win or profit. I would have been a lousy entrepreneur, I suppose. But I choose to see it all as great freedom.