Tip of My Iceberg

Beaches, with their sand, seaweed, and shells, bring a spectrum of responses from many. For children, it’s a sheer delight to run through sand and bury themselves in it.

For parents, it’s a royal pain to get all the grains out of hair and every other part of small bodies.

Sand is a small thing. To most adults, it’s mundane–very ordinary, commonplace, nothing spectacular to focus on.

For Sloane and Ward, the tiny beach near their home is a place of pleasure. The small lake isn’t something they can swim in, but they love to play in the sand, burying themselves in it, not caring that they’re not in swimsuits, but loving the feel of the warm granular sand.

Small things make up much of life. Ward loves to investigate everyday items–water, bugs, and plants. Common things bring him such delight when he combines different substances, like vinegar and baking soda. The bubbling effect was spectacular.

Small, maybe, but truly magnificent in his eyes.

I find I am too often running from one important thing to another or preparing for the next big project on my schedule to appreciate a pause.

Life can often feel like a Tilt-A-Whirl at a carnival, spinning so fast that the scenery around me is nothing but a blur. What I long for is that space to just observe or slowly move forward. Like a child fascinated by something small and common, I want to be amazed at all the wonder around me.

I treat time as if it’s a commodity that I can barter with. We all get the same 24-hour day, and an hour cannot be stretched or minimized. I need to value the time I’m given and learn to pause to smell the roses, so to speak.

God created time for us so that we could have rhythms for our lives, so we could establish patterns that would work for each of us. Every morning is a new beginning. Every sunrise reminds us of the constancy of the Creator.

God reminds us that time is not our taskmaster.

“For everything there is a season, a time for EVERY ACTIVITY under heaven…Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:1,10,11

I convince myself that if I keep moving, keep doing, it will all get done. How much of all this “doing” is necessary?

Or would it be better to pause, embrace the mundane, and find holy magnificence in the small pleasures–a full moon in a clear sky, dark clouds that announce a coming storm, a cup of coffee with a friend–and not worry about what isn’t getting done?

The mundane is magnificent.