The little things

I have Sirius Satellite Radio in my truck. I listen to channel 66 a lot, which is one of the Christian music channels. Once in a while, the pre-recorded announcer will come on between songs and make short statements which are supposed to get you thinking. Some of them are sort of lame or not very well thought out, but others are pretty good. The one that cracks me up the most though is this:
"Sometimes, it's the little things in life that move us the most."
My jovial affirmation is always, "Yeah, like a dose of Ex-lax!"
Case in point, sometimes the seemingly small things are the most important. A few examples:
A splinter. Small, but unmistakably painful.
A fuse. Small, but without it, your whole house or vehicle could shut off.
A spark. One of those occurred sometime before the great Chicago fire.
The tongue. Even though it is one of the smallest members of our body, it can do a lot of good or a lot of damage.
Emboli (or blood clots). If they break loose from their origin, they can travel through the blood stream and lodge in all the wrong places like your brain and cause a stroke, or lodge in the coronary arteries in the wall of your heart and cause a heart attack. The net result of either could be a life or death situation. All because of a little thing. Speaking of which... I got to go along to the cardiac cath lab recently, and watch the physician and his team place a stent in one of my patient's coronary arteries. Really cool stuff! Imagine trying to thread a fishing wire through about 3 feet of fuel hose, and when the tip comes out the other end, you have to make it do a sharp curve, then go through the eye of a needle to where the problem is. Only thing is, you can't watch the tip of the wire directly, but instead you must watch it through a continuous black and white video of x-rays.
How about something really tiny... a virus. So small that only the most elite of microscopes can view them, but yet these tiny little packets of genetic material can make us really sick, sometimes incurably.
Kelly's smile, or her eyes, like you saw in the last two blog posts. Yeah.... little things that might not be such a big deal to you, but they make a significant difference for me.
Words or numbers on a page. They can be boring or seem meaningless, or vivid and life changing. Or, if that number is one digit off, it can mean a very significant difference for our wallet, or drug dose, or who knows what else. Beware the typographical error.
Our computers and engines and everything else we use on a daily basis are composed of tiny little pieces that must work just right. Failure of the tiniest piece can cause a cascade of problems that can take a long time to sort out or fix.
The list could go on....
I am a slow learner. I am slow to understand, and never did profess to be really bright, but there's one thing I'm learning.... slowly. It is that there are so many small things that are so important. Everybody can see the big things, and pick out the good or bad about them, but the small things are where it starts. So it would seem logical that if the small things are important, then attention to detail would be a virtue, right? Not necessarily perfectionism, just simply PAYING ATTENTION and trying to understand even if you don't have it all figured out. So then, how is a person who is slow to understand supposed to pay attention to many details? When I did masonry or built pole barns, it was all about putting big things together. Now it's all about paying attention to little details that make so big of a difference. The little things are what our scientific discoveries and ingenuity are all about.
The point I'm getting at is this, I'm learning that spending the time to figure out the little things is where it's at. I would much rather just go ramming ahead, and go out to conquer a world of problems, but it is the sitting down and studying that prepares me for that first which is necessary. Writing it out and/or verbalizing helps even more. Without that down-time, I'm toppled pretty easily. It's why Solomon wisely told us "Study to show yourself approved unto God." Studying academic things is important, but I don't think that is the limit of what Solomon was talking about. Just randomly studying anything doesn't necessarily cause God to approve of us. Studying math is great, but you will never be able to calculate God's approval. That verse can be understood in several ways. Do you want a quiz in what it means to pay attention to the little things? Try studying that verse several times through by placing the emphasis on only one of the words at a time in that verse, or take consideration to what it would mean to place the emphasis a select few of those words at a time. Would that make a difference in how you went about studying? Does it make a difference in what you will study, or the reason you will study, and so on? Study (strive to gain understanding of) what it means to be approved by God. Study, so that God will approve of you. Two very different statements... eh?

Now the clincher:
Slow as I am, I'm having a hard time understanding the many little things in the book of Romans.