The way you do anything is the way you do everything

It's always a busy time in the lead up to a holiday. Busy at work trying to get things finished, and trying to remember all the little details of the projects I'm working on so that I can brief my colleagues sufficiently. Busy at home trying to remember all the little things that we need to take with us on holiday.. And there always seems to be at least one detail that gets missed! 

Details are pretty important really, and as I've been reflecting on this week's blog buddies title whilst driving between US cities (in a haze of travel weariness), it strikes me that 'the way we do anything' speaks about the importance of the little things, those details that accumulate to make up the big picture.

Yesterday at Downtown Disney there was a Lego store with various life size characters including the Incredible Hulk, all made up of thousands of pieces of Lego, which got me thinking about the myriad of small things that make us up (admittedly we're not made up of multicoloured small plastic bricks, I'm not trying to introduce a new foundation to science!).

It's really all the little 'anythings' that we do, the everyday things, that sum up to become the 'everything' of our lives - but sometimes we can get so focused on the big picture that we can spend our lives living only in anticipation for some future event, like we're stuck in Narnia's 'always winter and never Christmas', and missing out on the details that are good to appreciate and enjoy in our daily lives.

As Ian Stackhouse has put it in his excellent book 'The Day is Yours' (not, incidentally, yet another self help book about time management, but instead a great exegesis on the theology of the 'day'), we can only ever live in 'today' and therefore we should do our best to live each of our days well, as this is what in the end will result in us living our lives well - a series of days lived well, the summation of our 'anythings' into our 'everything'.

So lets be faithful in the small things and appreciate the daily Lego that's accumulating to make each of us the masterpiece that we are becoming. Lets embrace those 'days of small things' from the book of Zechariah, or as Robert Brault put it:

“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realise they were the big things.”