Fixing Small Things

A reflection for Lent

I ski among ruins of human endeavor as morning light begins to drape over snow-covered peaks. Relics of an old gold mine lay half buried on the steep slopes of Alaska’s Talkeetna mountains. The miners are long gone. Now the place is a historic state park. Here among peaks of enduring grandeur, I seek reprieve from grim headlines that seem to herald the ruin of our most enduring values as human beings. Integrity. Generosity. Compassion. So much seems broken.

Yet somehow out here the world is just as it has always been. Day after day, sunlight creeps over the horizon like a secret lover and climbs into the arms of granite and schist. Light plays among the peaks, dances across spires from one rocky ridge to the next until the entire valley is illuminated. All day she pours herself onto the landscape until there is nothing hidden, nothing too dark to be brought into radiance. When it is time to go, sunlight and rock bid farewell in deepening shadows that grow ever longer like arms reaching. Day after day, the dance. Century after century. My heart is calmed.

When I return home, I look around for my husband. He is not in the house. I check the barn, but he’s not there either. Finally, I find him in his shop. He is bent over several small pieces of wood.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

He looks up startled. “I was going to surprise you.”

Earlier in the week, our dog absconded with a treasured gift my grandson made when he was just three years old. It was a small wooden chest with five pull-out drawers. Elias used paint and his thumbprint to decorate the chest with ladybugs and flowers. This grandson is now twenty years old. Over the years the little chest has held surprise treasures and candy for subsequent grandchildren, now eleven in all. But the dog … she found the chest quite tasty. She chewed one drawer into splinters and obliterated a second drawer beyond repair.

Or so I thought. On my husband’s workbench sat two brand-new tiny drawers that he cut, glued, and carefully crafted with his weathered hands. He looked up and smiled. Just as my eyes had filled with tears when I first saw the ruins of this treasure, my eyes now fill with gratitude for this new thing he has created. I feel light drape over the clenched weight in my chest. I feel warmth fill the strained fissures of my heart. My husband explains how he tried more than once before he was able to successfully fuse the small pieces together. Right now I think that he is holding me together.

For all the brokenness, I too often forget how Love can craft ruins into unexpected gifts. I forget that mending the world might just begin with fixing small things. I will carry these tiny drawers with me into Lent, offering them up to be filled with light, even amid the ashes.