Oh How Much Great in the Small

What is it about a tiny baby that reduces a man to a babbling, infantile being spewing gibberish and nonsense like he’s lost his mind? This happens to me daily any time I see one of the four babies living here at Mercy House or whenever I spend time with my five-month-old grandson. Now I’m a sizable man – five feet ten, 215 (somewhat soft) muscular pounds – with a bald head, goatee and beard stubble, and the natural expression on my face doesn’t exactly exude friendliness; but put a baby in front of me and all that just seems to melt away.

I sit with my grandson and ponder the miracle that life is. I think about creation and the beauty all around me and I can’t help but marvel at the joy God must have felt as he was bringing it all into existence. I try to imagine what it must be like for a baby newly introduced to the glory of creation with no head knowledge of what anything is, experiencing life as it unfolds before it – the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feel of it all – and what it must be like trying to make sense of it all. And it’s a wonder that at 56 years of age I’ve made any sense of life at all. I simply sit in awe, overwhelmed by the complexity and enormity of life and the world we live in. And I long for that lack of head knowledge because I earnestly want to hold on to that infantile wonder and awe.

God created all of this for me, for you, for each and every tiny baby brought into this world.

Every time I hold a baby in my arms the words that well up in my soul are “Oh, how much great in the small!” and the facade I present to the rest of the world just melts away as the child in me – God’s child – rises to the surface, seeking His face.

Oh, how much great in the small!

Almost all jobs have their perks, but to be surrounded by these tiny beings containing the glory of heaven and angels and God – “Oh how much great in the small!” and “Oh, the glory of it all!”

Mark