The Big Picture

I have to walk to college, and it's a good twenty minutes. So, a couple of weeks into my first year at my college, I put a load of worship albums on my phone, found a pair of earphones, and started listening to CCM on my way to college. It was all going well, until my earphones - which were brand new when I started listening to music on my way to college - broke. What was even more annoying was that only one of the earphones broke; the other one was working fine, so I had to spend two whole days walking to college with music in one ear and not the other. I don't know if you've ever done this, but it's really disorientating. Furthermore, when you only have one earphone in, you find that there are certain parts of certain songs that only come through one earphone, and you don't realise it until that earphone doesn't work anymore. One of my favourite songs of all time is Holy One by Casting Crowns; this is partly because it has a great riff that you can dance to and air-guitar and just go crazy while you're listening to it. What I found out on the day that my earphones broke was that my favourite riff only comes through one earphone - the one that had broken.

It was this that got me thinking. We seem to have a mediated perception of the world, in that we can only really perceive that which is happening around us at any one particular time. We can't perceive something that is happening at five o' clock in the afternoon in a chip shop in Manchester if we currently find ourselves in an art gallery in London at three o' clock. To be even more precise, we can't perceive of someone making the bunny ears behind us while our mate takes a picture, because they're making the bunny ears behind us; unless you have eyes in the back of your head, you can't perceive what they're doing. It was the same when my earphone broke. I could only perceive what was coming through the one earphone, which meant that (to my great annoyance and disappointment) I couldn't perceive the great riff from Holy One.

What this made me think was something very similar to what I've already mentioned in I see what You did there. Basically, when we go through life and things happen to us and we generally just have experiences, we can't see the big picture of everything that's going on. We can't see how us getting up from our bus seat at one stop is going to affect someone getting on at the next stop - if it affects them at all. What we do affects others in ways that - most of the time - we are never going to find out, and God uses these situations to bring about His good; even in the tiniest things such as us getting up out of our seat on a full bus when there's a pregnant woman waiting to get on at the same stop.

So we don't need to look for the big things that we can do to bring about God's goodness in our broken world. (I'm not devaluing the big things, they are all necessary, but not everyone has the ability or the calling to the big things.) What I'm saying is that if the big things seem daunting and we feel inadequate because we're not at Speaker's Corner every Sunday reading from the Bible and preaching at whoever happens to be there, our feelings are unnecessary. The little things that we do can affect others in such a way as to bring about God's goodness, even if we're not around to see the results. Because after all, we can't see the big picture, but God can.