Mind the little things

I was building raised garden boxes and had begun to set them in the yard. I was trying to make each box properly squared with itself and all the other boxes, and there were eight of them, so it took some doing. After getting discouraged one evening, I called a friend from church to come help.

We got to work together and did the math over and over again, trying to make everything square and even, but no matter what we did, we ended up having an extra thirteen inches from one side to the other—which was very noticeable—and things looked crooked.

We may create major problems for ourselves and others through small but consistent steps away from the path the Lord desires for us.

To make a long story short, we had tried to be meticulous with our first garden box so we could measure off that one and use that to align all the others. My friend discovered that my first box, however, was off by a mere quarter of an inch. That is only 6.35 mm, or half the width of my pinky finger. But that little mistake put our string line on a bad trajectory that ended up being off the mark by over a foot by the time it got to the last box.

In life, there are plenty of times when we miss the mark in small ways. “It’s no big deal,” we think to ourselves. But left unchecked, those little things can change our trajectory by a major distance over the long haul. What began as a small mistake we didn’t even notice can become a glaring source of pain, and we may struggle to understand how we got there in the first place. This is why the little things are so important. We may create major problems for ourselves and others through small but consistent steps away from the path the Lord desires for us.

Very often, when we look at the big messes in our lives or in our world, we become paralyzed, but this is also when looking at the small things becomes so transformative. We may not know how to fix all those big things. What we may know, however, is something small that we can do today or tomorrow or this week.

What we might dismiss as “no big deal” often ends up being a very big deal in the long run. Something off the mark by half the width of my pinky finger can be a glaring issue down the road if left uncorrected. So, mind the little things today because they will truly matter tomorrow.