The Day of Small Things

Whenever it snows, I’m transfixed by its transforming power. Many of the houses that surround the school where I teach bear the marks of rental property; like the school, the lawns are half-heartedly attended. Trash litters the patchy grass. But covered in snow, all is beautiful.

At home, as I lay on my couch and watched the snow fall for hours, I kept hearing this refrain:

“White as snow, white as snow, though my sins were as scarlet, Lord I know, Lord I know, that I’m free and forgiven.” What a wonderful simile.

The next day was bright and sunny. Bundled up in layers, I ventured out for a long walk in the snow and this time was struck by something else: that the four plus inches of snow so luxuriously gracing everything - so very substantial a snowfall by Memphis standards - was in reality the end result of tiny individual snowflakes falling one at a time.

Which made me think of this verse in Zechariah, 4:10, “For who has had a poor opinion of the day of small things? For they will be glad when they see the weighted measuring-line in the hand of Zerubbabel.” The message here seems to be that big things are made of little things, little things that seem of no importance, things to be ignored, neglected, despised.

And yet everything is made of little things, without which nothing would be anything, so every little thing matters.

So maybe that’s why I decided to pull out the new yarn and needles I’d bought a few weeks ago and begin a knitting project unlike any I’ve ever attempted. Tiny needles, very lightweight yarn, little stitches requiring careful attention. My hands hurt from the contortion of using four needles. I have to keep holding the work up to my eyes, check for dropped stitches. I feel like a clumsy oaf, particularly when my last project was made with needles literally 10 times bigger than these.

But I like it. The progress is slow, but the results very pleasing, and I need this reminder that everything is made from small things.