Trust the Little Things

I admit it, sometimes I let “little things” annoy me and get me frustrated. You know what I’m talking about. You’re late for a meeting and the car in front of you is going really slow for no apparent reason. The checker at the grocery store tosses your groceries into little plastic bags like they are footballs. The waitress at the restaurant brings you water but never comes back to take your order, so you have to ask a bus boy if she passed away or something. Little things that somehow creep into our everyday lives like centipedes on steroids. It can be really frustrating, leaving us constantly asking… why is this happening to me?

I was talking with a friend the other day who is a grandmother to three small children. She told me about a little thing that happened to her last week that was really frustrating… at first. She had volunteered to take her three small grandchildren to Disneyland. Her plan was to meet up at the entrance with another friend who had a small child so they could spend the day together. On the way to Disneyland her GPS pointed her to an unfamiliar street. She got nervous, pulled over and put the address back into the GPS again to double check it. It gave her the same unfamiliar route but she decided to take it anyway, although the fear of getting lost or parking in the wrong area was creeping into her thoughts in a big way. Sure enough the route took her to a long term parking lot that required a shuttle to actually get to the entrance to the theme park. She was already late to meet up with her friend, the kids were getting restless and unhappy in the back seat, and she was parking in a “foreign land” instead of “Disneyland”.

As you can imagine, with three small children to deal with her frustration level was pretty high as she got the three kids out of the car.  That is until she noticed a familiar face just three spaces away. Here friend had accidentally taken the same route and ended up in the same parking structure at the exact same time.

You can call it a coincidence or you can call it a miracle… Or you can simply decide that perhaps the reason that God doesn’t always give us the answers to the “whys” in our lives is because sometimes we don’t have the capacity to understand the answer. Maybe that’s a good reason to relax and trust that things, even the little things, will always work out.

Disneyland Entrance (circa 1965)

In learning to trust God, we must accept that we may not know 

all the answers, but we do know who knows the answers.

 ~ Max Lucado