painting a masterpiece

The local schools started back today. Another year begins.

I was along to our local primary school three times. Not bad for the first day back!

It was meant to be only twice, but when I went for the 9am assembly which I'd been told would be on, I learned that they'd switched it to 1.30pm instead. 9am on the first day back was never going to work. I should have sussed that out.

Great to see all the children again. One girl came up to me after the later assembly and asked Did you bury a Mr and Mrs Brown?

In the course of the years, with a name like that, there's more than a few people 'Brown' whom I've 'buried' (the term is used loosely, of course, since most folk here are cremated).

But I figured I knew to whom the girl was referring. I gave the girl their Christian names and asked if these were the couple to whom she was referring. They were. Her great-grand-parents no less.

It must have been maybe as many as fifteen years ago since they died, but I still remember them well. A lovely couple. They'd died, of course, before the girl had been born, so I think she was glad to hear what I had to say about them. A link with a past which she'd not ever known for herself.

There's something going on in her mother's life as well. A seeking, a search for meaning and purpose in life. Trying to figure out just what the whole thing means and how to make sense of it all.

These fleeting, and seemingly idle, conversations in the passing - like the one with this girl today - are somehow part of a much bigger work of the Lord.

Like tiny little dabs of paint upon an artist's massive masterpiece - these small and simple contacts, insignificant in themselves, serve to make a stunning picture in the fulness of the time, whereby a person finally gets to see the Lord.

Very little of what we ever do is a one-off coup-de-grace. It's more like one small further thread sewn through a tapestry, or one more simple brush-stroke down the canvas as a painting slowly forms.

All the countless conversations that we have - today there's been a visit to a woman who's bereaved, a call to see about a baptism in the coming months, some time spent with a lady in a nursing home, a run-through with the couple getting married here tomorrow - all the countless conversations that we have are careful little brush-strokes in the hand of God.

One day when we get to see the masterpiece we'll see just how significant what seemed so very insignificant has been!