The Small Stuff

When you're a girl from the flat lands of Kansas, it's easy to get distracted by the majesty of the mountains. Practically as soon as the "Leaving Kansas" sign disappeared from our rear view mirror, I peered toward the horizon, squinting my eyes to see if I could glimpse the mountains in the distance.

It's not that I wanted to leave Kansas forever, but the sign did just welcome me to Colorful Colorado, after all. For this Sunflower Girl, the mountains are a novelty, a different kind of beauty than the sunsets that stretch for eternity and beyond outside my front door. Kansas is equally beautiful: It's just a different kind of beautiful.

It's hard to miss the beauty in the "big" things ... the mountains, the sunrises, the birthdays, the weddings, the anniversaries, the reunions, and all the firsts and the lasts.

But sometimes, in our haste to look forward to the next "big thing," we miss the myriad of small things that make up all those big moments.

I had already been thinking about this when I happened across a beautiful blog about this very thing. Emily at Chatting at the Sky, who was saying goodbye to her father-in-law, said it so eloquently.

With the magnificence of the towering mountains, it might have been easy to miss the yellow blanket of wildflowers stretching across a mountain meadow.

I might have walked right past purple flowers whose heads bowed under the weight of morning dew.

I might not have crossed the road to see the spikes of red hiding in a sea of green.

I may have seen only the rushing water of a river instead of pondering the petals of flowers nourished by the underflow.


I might have walked past a the fence row of wildflowers in my haste to begin a walk on a 2-mile trail.

I could have ignored the little flowers as I looked at the clouds teetering on the mountaintops in the distance.

And isn't that what we are prone to do in our everyday lives? We are so busy. We are so hurried. We are so frazzled. We are so consumed with checking things off the to-do list that we fail to appreciate the little blessings that God sends our way each and every day.

So, today, I will cherish the small things ... the tomato fresh from the vine, a favorite song on the radio, a phone call, the touch of a hand, the compliment I don't think I deserve, the email from a friend, the smell of freshly-turned earth on an early morning walk, a cool house on a hot day ... Small blessings abound, if we just pause to look for them. And after all, the bigger picture is composed of nothing more than the small stuff.

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A clarification: The photos were taken in Grand Teton National Park, not Colorado. But I'm glad the photos of the wildflowers reminded some of my Facebook friends of their Colorado landscapes, too. During our 3,255 miles, we saw and experienced the mountains of Colorado (from a distance), Wyoming, Utah and Idaho. Beautiful!