So, here it is!  My very first audio blog!  Click the link below to listen to a short section out of my new (still-being-written) book titled God Revealed -- Finding God in the Marriage Relationship.  Both the link and the text are below.

Little Things! Audio MP3

Life is like a river bottom.  Small pebbles fill the gaps between large boulders and stones.  It is there in the cracks and holes between the pebbles, that living things thrive.  Sure, life can be found under the large stones too, but it’s the small pebbles that make river life full.

So it is with us.  For instance, my father loved Mom’s chocolate cake.  He also loved his ice cream and the two always seem to find their way together onto his plate.  He had this way of always wanting them to come out even, so if he ran out of ice cream first, he would ask for another scoop and if the cake disappeared too quickly, why another piece needed to take its place on his plate!  Funny how that cycle seemed to be endless….  I don’t suppose my dad was the first to perfect the ice cream/chocolate cake cycle, but this little way of his enriched my life.  I could tell you story after story of how the little things of life – from finding where in the barn the mother cat had hidden her kittens to walking with Dad across the meadows discussing the grass, to coming in from the field to Mom’s fresh bread and strawberry jam – enriched me and filled my life with good things.  There were also lots of nasty, jagged stones in my river bottom.  The bullies at school were really big rocks for me.  Later, as I got older I had to choose a career, go to college and find a job.  Those three stones may not have been “nasty”, but they were difficult.  Yet even then the richness of life, for me, was found in the pebbles, the little things of everyday existence.  I find God there.  Even when life is so hard that I want to give up, I can see Him in the little things.  In the little joys – like eating Ruth’s strawberry freezer jam – I touch a little fringe of His joy and my joy is made full.

Ruth and I find this to be even more true as we get older and our decades together increase.  Our joy is found in “doing life” together.  Whether it’s doing the “Walmart Challenge” as we shop for the necessities of life, or like last summer when we shared a picnic in the car because the yellow jackets were too thick around the picnic table, we do the little things together.  We touch God in those places and each pebble He gives us is covered with rich life.

If all we had in our river bottom was stones, life would be arduous, even bitter.  The finance stone is always present.  The unemployment stone has sharp, cutting edges.  The get-along-with-your-boss stone might be sharp and rough or it might have smooth edges, but it’s usually tough to deal with.  Thank God for the pebbles in between that make the river bottom easier to walk on.  

Do you want to know what the best thing about pebbles is?  Sometimes…when you look closely at the pebbles that fill the gaps between the stones of your river bottom…sometimes one of them turns out to be……a gold nugget!