The Big Picture

Have you experienced times when you were able to see your own circumstances as one small part of a much bigger picture? How do you think prayer can be a gateway to this kind of "big picture" perspective?

When I was a boy living in the post-WWII era during the advent of television, one of the first TV shows I remember was called The Big Picture, a sort-of crude documentary by current standards which revisited the war with countless shots of bombs dropping from air crafts and big guns firing tracers into the night. It was very vivid despite the grain and the picture on the black and white 21" console television set. To me, the TV itself was "the big picture" so I'm pretty sure I never understood the dramatic significance of the title.

And now, as one of seven billion humans inhabiting our little blue ball, I'm pretty sure I still don't understand the BIG picture--that all of time and space hinges on a wooden cross on a rocky hill in an ancient country during a very brief moment of the time-space continuum. Seven billion of us each thinking we must matter more than the other ones, that our blink-of-an-eye existences have some significance to the One who spoke everything from nothing. At least that's the way we act.

So can my quiet words spoken only in my amoeba brain find their way through all of that? Heavenly Father, you tell us that it can. You tell us that we matter. You tell us that each of us, like a toddler bumping into the coffee table over and over again, that we can seek you and that you are delighted with us and that we are forgiven. Of course you offer glimpses of the Big Picture in other ways--starry nights, oceans, atoms, light-years, the Wonder of it All--but most of us cannot entertain those thoughts for long before we must retreat back into our much smaller, more shallow, but somewhat manageable existences. I hope this does not seem too existential. God, you are so big but still choose to inhabit my heart. Why?