The Bigger Picture
When our two grown sons were children, my wife and I didn’t have the privilege of living close to their grandparents. We had professions that made it difficult to visit our parents except during summer months when the boys were out of school. Consequently, our boys only saw their grandparents once or twice a year.
It was always a treat when we parked our car in their driveway and the grandparents came rushing out to greet us. Our boys, not able to contain their excitement, would jump out of the car almost before we stopped and run toward maw-maw and paw-paw. The grandparents were excited, too, and upon seeing their grandsons would immediately comment how much the boys had grown. They would say things like, “The kids have grown so much since we last saw them,” or “What are you feeding these guys?” They would go on and on about how much the boys had changed since they were last seen.
I would glance at our sons and not see all that much difference. I simply thought the grandparents were making small talk or trying to make mom and dad feel good. But the fact is the boys had grown. My wife and I hadn’t noticed their growth because we were with them every day and failed to appreciate their incremental development.
The changes in their physical, emotional, and mental make-up had been going on day by day, but we were so focused on making sure they finished their homework or weren’t late for school or brushed their teeth before bed that we missed the imperceptible but real changes that were taking place every day. We had become stuck in our own individual blocks of time, the day-to-day details, where the bigger picture had become blurred.
Life has a way of weighing us down like that, doesn’t it? We can get so bogged down in the routine, the challenges that confront us each day, that we fail to appreciate the larger canvas. We can easily lose perspective and become absorbed with what occupies us right now, in the present moment, and convince ourselves that all of life has collapsed into a singular frame of time, when in reality it is only one tick of the second hand.
Take the present moment in America and even the world, for that matter. With rising prices in stores, trade wars, predictions of a possible recession, the dramatic reduction of the federal government workforce, and the controversial deportations of migrant people, we can become stuck in what’s happening now. By failing to see the bigger picture, we can become fixated on this moment, thinking that this tick of the second hand is all there is or ever will be.
The pages of history are strewn with moments when there was more darkness than light, when people struggled to see past the present. Take, for instance, the biblical story of Israel. God’s people spent as much time in the darkness as they did in the light. The 400 years of Egyptian slavery take up only a few verses in Scripture but must have seemed like an eternity for the generations of Israelites who experienced the endless hardships of servitude.
Then, too, the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities, the destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the razing to the ground of the beautiful temple of Solomon must have seemed like the end of the world to the Israelites. Israel’s history is a story of suffering and deprivation with only a few interludes of peace and prosperity. But somehow the people of faith believed that their present moment of suffering, regardless of how long it lasted, was not the complete picture. They never gave up hope. And they never gave up on God.
From the time Jesus began his ministry, the shadow of the cross loomed large. His entire life was a journey towards death, yet he saw the bigger picture and refused to get bogged down in the daily temptations or take the easy way out. When Jesus was put to death, the disciples thought that this was the end of his story, when in reality it was only the beginning. They, too, failed to see the bigger picture.
We don’t have to read the Bible, however, to find examples of people who chose not to let the darkness of the moment determine their future. In the 1930s, when the stock market crashed, and banks failed all across the country, and people lost their jobs, it would have been easy to have thrown in the towel, to have given in to despair. But the American people were resilient and did not become stuck in that block of time but believed that better days were ahead. Their ability to see a bigger picture motivated them to rise above their feelings of gloom and doom.
In spite of all that Americans went through during the 1930s, they also had to fight a world war in the 1940s. Their remarkable story of refusing to let the darkness extinguish the light has led historians to call these Americans “The Greatest Generation.” I doubt if many of these heroic Americans could have imagined in the mire of the Great Depression that their generation would go down as the high water mark in American history.
Several years ago I became acquainted with the work of a French impressionistic artist named George Seurat. Seurat had developed a unique technique of painting called “Pointillism.” In pointillism the artist never uses a brush stroke but only makes small dots on the canvas. To the uninitiated observer the dots seem random, formless, and without a particular pattern. Only as the work nears completion can one begin to make out details and see the intended image as something beautiful.
“A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat. Pointillism
That we are going through a difficult time few would deny. But this is only one moment in time as the second hand continues to move forward. The American dream has not nearly run its course, if we only have the vision to see the bigger picture!
