So I’ve been reading the end of Exodus where God describes exactly what He required regarding the Tabernacle and the priestly attire. If you’ve ever read it, you’ll see how specific everything is. The High Priest’s robe had to be purple, blue, scarlet, with gold. The gold woven in their garments came from gold pounded thinly and then cut into thread! They wore bells at the hem exactly between woven pomegranates. The Bible describes the breastplate with exact gemstones to represent each tribe and exactly how they should be set and exactly how the breastplate should be attached and on and on. There’s this overwhelming sense of how important the details were. It mattered how everything looked, how the Tabernacle was run, and how everything was made, even to the point of getting Moses’ approval that it was done to God’s specifics!
Now, one could argue that this was God’s house and He was just designing His house the way we all design our own houses: to our personal tastes. However, the overwhelming peace I got from reading what some would categorize as minutiae, told me otherwise. These passages were screaming, “God cares about the details.”
God cares about my details just as much. I used to believe that God concerned Himself with the big things of my life and the little things that don’t matter were allowed to be up to me because they really didn’t matter. However, there have been too many instances, understood or not, where God demonstrated that every detail of my life is a big deal to Him and He’ll take care of them equally as well as He takes care of the “big deals.”
Let me share two very personal examples of this. For some this may be too personal or too much information (for men especially) and if so, I apologize for that. However, I’m being real and thankfully our God is a very real God! Also, these examples are truly poignant to how much God cares for us in our darkest moments and I wouldn’t trade them for anything, so please see my heart to share that above all.
The first example is when our eldest daughter was 3 and just one month after her leukemia diagnosis. We were in a tailspin of doctor’s appointments, traveling long distances multiple times a week for treatments, and really still trying to wrap our minds around the whole thing. It was our youngest daughter’s second birthday and we had absolutely nothing to give her. I don’t mean gifts. I mean of ourselves. We were fighting to save the life of our other daughter and we honestly couldn’t think about a birthday, gifts, party, celebration…nothing. I consoled myself saying she would be too young to remember that we did nothing for her birthday, but it was still crummy. All of a sudden, a precious friend of mine stops by with a huge box of gorgeous professionally made cupcakes! She brought them to celebrate our baby’s birthday! I cried! I hadn’t told anyone, including that friend, that we weren’t (or couldn’t handle) doing anything for her birthday. She just showed up. I knew instantly this was God seeing into this mother’s heart and providing something she so desperately needed! Would our little daughter have been fine never celebrating her 2-year-old birthday? Yes, but God showed up to prove He sees, He understands, and He’s in the details.
My second example is more graphic. Men can skip this section. I’ll give fair warning. This was a few months before Ariel’s diagnosis. I was three months pregnant with what would’ve been our 4th child. I’ve miscarried before, so when I started cramping, I was extremely worried. I went to the doctor to discover our child was no longer living. He gave me the choice of a D&C to clear my body or wait till it happened naturally. I hated the D&C last time, so I went home to think and pray about it. I was grief-stricken and couldn’t understand why I was going through all of this. I remember telling God that I hated the smell of period blood. I didn’t know if I could handle that smell associated with the loss of our baby. I didn’t know if I could handle a natural miscarriage at home or if I should just deal with the D&C and the rush of hormones I experienced last time. The next morning, the decision was made for me: the natural miscarriage had begun. But here is where God showed up in a very personal way. Before the miscarriage began, the kids and I were in the bathroom closet digging for something when an old tiny vial of my husband’s cologne fell and shattered on the tile floor. It was a little mess we had to clean up, frustrating at the time, but later I would realize what it truly was. God orchestrated that little mess to fill the whole bathroom with a pleasant smell for the whole duration of my miscarriage!! Not one time did I have to smell any blood! It was a terribly sad situation that God cradled me through and showed me just how intimate the God of the universe can be with those who are His!
I had to stop writing this to cry a little bit, just remembering how precious He’s been to me just like that so many times. I share these gruesome stories to tell others God is in your details too! I don’t understand how the God of everything, Who is perfect and sovereign can love us so much. I just can say He does. This God can handle all your big deals, but even more special, He handles all your tiny deals too.
Love to all,
Jenn