The Small Moments

"Write about a moment in your life that felt small at the time, but looking back, changed everything."

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It’s funny. The older I get, the more I notice the small moments, the ones that carry life-changing gravitas, as they’re happening.

Not always, of course. I’m still human. Still distracted. Still capable of missing the obvious. But it feels like a fundamental truth of where I am on this journey, here and now: I’m paying closer attention.

What fascinates me most is that when I first began turning this question over in my mind, the moments that surfaced weren’t my own. They were moments from other people’s lives. Moments that were surely life-altering for them and yet rose up as vividly as if I had lived them myself.

That’s what happens when you love people. When you care for them as if they walk around with your heart beating inside their chest. You feel the ground shift, even when it isn’t under your own two feet.

I digress. Again. I often do.

There have been so many small moments in my life that ended up changing everything.

When I was eight or nine years old, my best friend and I once entered our elderly neighbor’s home - we neighborhood kids called them Grandma and Grandpa - and utterly destroyed her kitchen. I can only describe our behavior as gleeful, almost evil abandon, bubbling up from somewhere only God knows.

That small, awful moment forever shattered any illusion I had about my own sweetness and light. The perfect child revealed herself to be… not so perfect.

That one still stings.

There was another moment, years later, in high school. I was out joyriding with a friend, dressed to help her wash her car. On a whim, we took a spontaneous turn through a popular local park. That turn led me to meet the man I would eventually marry.

That man has been changing my life, quietly, steadily, profoundly, for nearly forty-four years.

There was the moment I sat in a dorm room, surrounded by half a dozen young women in the middle of our first semester as college freshmen, and said out loud, for the first time, that I might be pregnant.

That moment itself felt pregnant, so heavy with meaning, swollen with fear and hope and uncertainty. The weight of it is impossible to fully capture in words.

Journey played on the stereo, accompanying our thoughts that bounced silently around the room. For a few long minutes, no one spoke. Each of us was tucked deep inside her own emotions. That brief, fragile pause became a cocoon for me.

And when someone finally broke the silence, I realized something astonishing: I felt safe. I felt heard. I felt free.

I was very young when our church was ravaged by a fire that destroyed the sanctuary and caused $750,000 in damage. In 1969 dollars! The chapel, the columbarium, and the classroom wing were spared, but for two years as the building was rebuilt, we held church on the campus of a local college.

One Sunday, my Sunday school class met outside, sitting on the grass. Our senior pastor wandered over and sat down with us. A boy in my class looked at him and asked, “Dr. Potter, when do we get to go back to church?”

Dr. Potter paused. A small smile crossed his face. He looked slowly around the circle, meeting each of our eyes. Then, in a deep baritone that convinced young me he might very well be God himself, he said,

“Son, look around this circle. Do you see your classmates? Your teachers? Church is not a building. This is church. The people we care about. The earth that holds us. The love between us.”

I was small, but please believe me when I tell you, I have never forgotten that moment or those words. It’s impossible to overstate how deeply that small moment shaped my life, my mind, my heart, my soul.

I like to think of God as an author. Not only of the Greatest Story Ever Told, but of our individual lives. He gives us an outline: fate, or destiny. He gives us free will: choices to make, roads to travel. And what emerges is a literary cacophony comprised of poetry and song, notes and quotes, novellas and short stories, comedies and dramas, tragedies and sweeping epic adventures.

His hand in all of it. The details, our own.

In the Book of Life, each of us is, at different times, the narrator and the main character, the love interest and the antagonist, the aggrieved and the aggressor, the damned and the blessed, the supporting cast and the background noise.

And when we find the words…
When we notice the small moments…
When we recognize the change…

Even then, we keep on writing.

Thank God.

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