On Tuesday I was at the funeral for my grandmother, Wilma V. James. Wilma lived most of her 95 years in an industrial town named Owensboro, Kentucky. She raised three boys and worked at General Electric for decades. She outlived my grandfather by almost 22 years. You won’t likely read anything about her other than her obituary. Hers was a beautiful little life.
Do We Value a Little Life?
Do we value little lives? Do we see them as beautiful? Perhaps not. It’s easy to find someone preaching to follow your dreams, to aim for the stars, to become somebody. It’s even easy to baptize the fear of obscurity with Christian lingo, so that the measure of a life’s worth becomes how “radical” it is. What’s not easy is to hear a little life, given to a little family in a little town, held up as desirable. So much of modern life seems to be about escaping, through whatever means available, smallness. This seems tragic to me. There’s beauty in that smallness.
My guess is that we don’t value little lives because we don’t value what God values. Reflect for a moment on how much God loves the unseen and the seemingly “pointless.” Reflect on the planets in the visible universe that are uninhabitable, dark, cold, and remote. AS far as we know there are millions of planetary bodies that seem to be little more than floating landscapes. Have you ever thought about why God has made a universe and galaxies so enormous that we will almost certainly never even see most of it, let alone “use” or understand it? Perhaps it’s merely because God thinks such invisible, “useless” creations are beautiful. Perhaps it’s merely because He likes them. God likes what we cannot even perceive.
Perhaps we misjudge the value of little lives also because we don’t evaluate correctly. We all know how to quantify selling millions of albums or getting a six-figure advance or pastoring a 10,000 member church. We don’t know how to quantify feeding a family that turned around and fed another family, and another, and another. We know how to quantify being an “influencer” with a million followers, but we don’t know how to value parenting future parents of parents. In other words, we only see concentrated value, not generational value. This is the definition of failing to think in terms of eternity.
I wonder sometimes if it’s always been this way. Older generations seem to have more or less accepted the borders of their lives. Moderns have grown up on technology that promised a way of escape from the givenness of things. We’re upwardly mobile and connected. We can ditch town any time and become celebrities without leaving our living room. We don’t have to be here, we can be anywhere. A little life is thus all the more loathsome to us because it is all the more avoidable. Anonymity can be cheated with a smartphone and a free app. Insecurity can be mollified with the right filter. There’s no modern reason we have to stare down our fear of the “same old thing.”
The problem comes when I try to reconcile my grandmother’s life with my obsession to escape a small life. How much blessing did she infuse into my life through merely her presence? How much was I shaped by the meals, the open doors, the simple “How are you doing” calls? She was not anywhere; she was here. She was here, in a small obscure life, for my Dad. He was here for me. Where would I have ended up if it had not been this way? Suddenly I wonder if the problem is that I want to be on the receiving end of a little life, rather than the giving end. Let me dine on the fruits of obscure love and kindness while I use everything in my power to become famous or significant.
I pray that as I contemplate my grandmother’s glorious, little life, my heart will begin to release its craving for stature and instead look with love at the people and places my Creator has put right in front of me. To see a little life as beautiful instead of punishment is an act of love: Love for others and love for Jesus, who makes the least to be greatest in his kingdom. Obscurity is not failure and simplicity is not tragic when they reflect the worth of the world to come. The corners of the universe are invisible now, but they won’t stay that way. They’ll be glorious in our new eyes soon enough.
For Grandma, they already are.
This article originally appeared here.
