Tiny People Working Tiny Fields

An appeal to love life and other people

Do you have regrets? Who doesn’t? When I see mine, they pile up like broken glass in a plowed field, a field so littered with broken glass and rusting tin cans I know it will never produce a crop.

You bet I have regrets for every time I hurt my brother when we were kids, for two divorces, going broke in business three times and getting fired from four jobs. I’m a poster child for regret, missteps, hurts, bungled opportunities.

I am also a poster child for redemption, forgiveness, people giving me second, third and many, many extra chances. No wonder I believe God works that way. If God were punishing and judgmental, I would have been out of business a long time ago.

Don’t pay attention to me. Pay attention to a forgiving, loving God of many extra chances. Pay attention to an ultimate mover, the biggest of big deals who will keep on picking you up, dusting you off and starting all over again.

Life is not about getting rich and famous. Life is about doing the best you can with what you have been given and serving other people. The great old cartoon character, Andy Capp, once said, “There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, it’s hard to know which of us ought to tell the rest of us how to live.”

I’m telling you anyway. Love God and love your neighbors, and if you don’t believe in God, consider that whatever hung the stars in the sky also had a whole lot to do with your parents having children and your grandparents and their parents. Ancestry goes all the way back, and if that doesn’t make you feel special, you’re missing something. Stars and babies go all the way back, way back beyond recorded history. We are all the products of people who survived fires and wars and diseases and starvation. We are unlikely to have been born, and yet, here we are. When I use the word “God,” I’m talking about all that which brought you into being. Call it “universe” if you can’t call it God. Call it “the totality of everything,” if you need to or even “random chance.” Whatever brought you to this place in this time, deserves your loving devotion. Love that, and love your neighbors, especially those who are hard to love. Love them all. Laugh at everything that ever kept you from loving them in the past. Smile, listen, put a hand out. Life is too short to stay angry and cranky. Fall in love with life itself and then spread that love to other people.

Most of us are tiny people working a tiny field. The land we plow, plant and harvest is next to nothing compared to all the land on the planet. The work we do, for most of us, only affects a few people, but those few people mean everything. Those few people are the great work of our lives. Don’t be thinking your best work is off somewhere else. It is right here. Right now.

I once did a wedding at Little Switzerland, North Carolina. The town has access to magnificent views of the Appalachian Mountains. The views make up just a few hundred miles of the massive mountain range that runs from Maine to Georgia. But those views are made of millions of tons of earth and rock and trees and flowers that have been there for a long, long time. As I was talking to the bride and groom about the view we could see from their wedding venue, I encouraged them to consider themselves part of all that dirt and rock and trees and flowers and millions of years of time gone by. They looked at me like I had two heads, but it was okay. We got through it well enough.

The same is true of you. You are part of all that dirt and rock and trees and flowers and the stars in the sky. You may be a tiny person working a tiny field, but you are part of that which you came from. That fact makes the old sacred words encourage you to love God and love your neighbor.

Because we are so tiny, we sometimes think what we do doesn’t matter. We can go on and be hateful, angry, unforgiving, blasting away with selfish, criminal behavior and it won’t matter, because we are so tiny, so insignificant, so miniscule compared to those mountains and those stars. When we remember that we are part of everything, part of all that is, was and ever shall be, suddenly who we are and how we treat other people is a very big deal.

You do with this whatever you like. You were going to before I gave you permission, but remember this. The order to love God and love your neighbor goes way back. It didn’t start with what you just read.