We live in a world that seems to promote the idea that bigger is better. Cities vie with each other to claim the greatest growth and the fanciest entertainments. Corporations are proud when their company occupies the tallest building in the city. We have megamalls, megachurches and megastorms.

But the Bible tells us that small things matter in the kingdom of God! Jesus spoke of the importance of small things: a mustard seed, a cup of cold water, a widow’s mite, a kindness done to the least of these.

“What shall we say the Kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.”

The common black mustard seed was the smallest of all the seeds sown in the fields of Palestine. It took about 760 mustard seeds to weigh ONE gram. How small is one gram? Well, it takes 28 grams to equal one ounce. That’s how small mustard seeds are. But growing from such a small seed the mustard shrub becomes the largest of all garden plants. It reaches heights of 12-15 feet in a few weeks.

Little things can make a big difference!

The most massive living thing on planet Earth is the General Sherman, a giant sequoia found in central California’s Sequoia National Park on the western slope of the Sierra Nevadas. This tree stands at nearly 274. 9 feet and has a girth of 102. 6 feet near its base. It is estimated to weigh 2,756 tons. It is approximately 2,200 years old. The seeds of the giant sequoia are about the size of an oat flake, and according to the Guinness Book of World Records they weigh only 1/6,000 of an ounce.

Don’t ignore the power of little things. Someone has said the sweetest music comes only from the smaller birds. As a matter of fact, the smaller birds are the only ones who really sing. You don’t hear many beautiful notes from turkeys or ostriches or eagles. But you do hear beautiful music from canaries, wrens and larks.

The story is told that a sparrow once asked a wild dove, “Tell me the weight of a snowflake.”

“Nothing more than nothing,” the dove answered.

“In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story,” the sparrow said. “I sat on the branch of a fir tree, close to its trunk, when it began to snow–not heavily, not in a raging blizzard–no, just like in a dream, without a sound, and without any violence.

“Since I did not have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the 3,741,953rd snowflake dropped onto the branch, nothing more than nothing, as you say, the branch broke off.’

Having said that, the sparrow flew away. The dove, since Noah’s time as an authority on such matters, thought about the story for a while, and finally said to herself, “Perhaps only one person’s voice is lacking for peace to come to the world.”

Don’t ignore the power of little things. Don’t ignore the power of a solitary voice to change the world. Your voice, my voice, our actions might be just what the world needs, when trusted to our Heavenly Father’s care.

Meanwhile don’t be surprised if the seeds you plant look ineffective, if it seems like no one values what you do. Don’t be surprised if the witness you have to offer gets laughed at on account of looking so puny. It’s the old “Jack and the Beanstalk” fable: Jack’s mother scorns the tiny beans he brings home from the market. They can never live off those! So in anger she hurls them out the window. Those beans were a non-starter, a mistake, a dead-end — nutritionally and in every other sense. Except that, of course, they ended up sprouting into a beanstalk that went, in a way, clear up to heaven.

We are called to scatter the seeds. It is the work of our Heavenly Father to make them sprout and grow. And in His hands it is amazing how large the harvest can be!

In the early 1950s farmer Clarence Mauerhan was known as the “Chili Pepper King” of Orange County (“Anaheim peppers,” anyone?). A mysterious buyer was paying top dollar for all the farms in the area, but farmer Mauerhan would have none of it. He was the lone holdout against payments for land that no one had dreamed were possible.

Finally, it was revealed who was buying up all this land: someone named Walt Disney. Mr. Disney said he planned on putting in an amusement park on the land and needed Mr. Mauerhan’s farm for the parking lot. But Mr. Mauerhan would have none of it: “When I die, I will own this land. No one is taking it from me.”

So, without any attorneys, man-to-man, Mauerhan and Disney struck a deal: Mr. Mauerhan would own the land and lease the land to Mr. Disney for a certain percentage of the appraised value of the land. But Mr. Mauerhan insisted that since it was still his land, every car that parked on his land should pay him something. They settled on 3 mills per car, or three-tenths of a penny per vehicle. An infinitesimal amount of money, you say. Except when millions of cars park on this land in a year. Suddenly the infinitesimal is a golden goose that makes an extended family extremely wealthy over an extensive period of time.

What seems like a small thing to us can become larger than we can imagine if we trust in our Heavenly Father, whose kingdom knows no end!

Let’s keep doing the little things and trusting God to do great things!

Linnea K. Gustafson

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of The Kewanee Voice.

***This column is sponsored by the Kewanee Ministerial Association