Redeeming the time, Part 3

I’m just stepping into the pantry, pulling item from shelf lip or freezer’s deep cavern, when I am compelled to stop, and consider.

She makes semi trucks look impish. She defies iron men. She obliterates the marvel of LeTourneau’s earth-moving machines. And she has no idea of her power.

A discarded grain of rice, fallen from the bag months ago—she finds it, and takes it home. But where is home? How far must she travel? It doesn’t faze her, because it’s all in a day’s work, and effort exerted shows that we’re alive. I think she understands better than humans, this dance of duty and delight, this mystery of muscles clenching and hands raised in praise, this paradox or working out what God works in, and it is all grace, given in God-life-power.

She scouts out her journey as she travels, clinging with one thread arm to the printer lip, while the rest of her frame hangs, clenching rice grain in her jaw. How can she hold a load her body size, and double her weight?

She changes her mind, struggles back on top of printer lid, and tests more possibilities. Finally, she shimmies down the face, rice dangling ahead of her, pulling her towards the fall off the shelf. She does fall, onto freezer, where she immediately searches for the rice grain, which bounced away from her when they landed.

She’s walking in circles—how can she not be dazed? So I scoot the rice grain towards her. “Here it is!” She finds it, and treks again, this time off the freezer lid, down the side—a feat five times harder than the printer expedition.

I’d be done by now. I’d quit. I’d say it’s not worth it and curl up in self-pitying, lazy heap.

She keeps going—without prodding, or nagging, or competing, or supervision.

She works, and her life is praise to her Maker.

“Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise, which, having no captain, overseer or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer, and gathers her food in the harvest.”

And maybe, just maybe, the infinitesimal, the too-small-to-notice, the minute marvels of creation teach us what it really means to redeem the time.

“Therefore whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.”