Ludwig Mies van der Rohe has just recently become one of my favorite people. By recently I mean in the last 90 seconds thanks to Wikipedia. I once thought it would be fun to have a church wide picnic and I excitedly announced it to my staff and pulled out my pen to put it in our all church calendar. The staff was enthusiastic in their support, (they know who signs their checks) but then they started coming up with incredibly irrelevant, in my determination, questions. What are we going to eat? Who will prepare the meal? Where are we going to do it and who will set up all the chairs and tables? What if it rains? The details put a huge damper on my vision and I slowly returned the pen to my pocket.
This brings me back to my new friend Ludwig. He coined the phrase “God is in the detail(s)” Now you may have heard it in a way that gives the devil the credit, but Ludwig stated that it is the small details that are most important and whatever is done is done most thoroughly. God, not the devil, is the one using the most inconsequential events, which are often overlooked by the ordinary passerby, to advance His kingdom and bring glory to Himself.
Example #1. In the early 1600’s, a young indian boy kidnapped by an Englishman and sold to Spain as a slave. Some monks who were repulsed by the idea of slavery freed him and taught him in the ways of the Catholic faith. Learning English, he was able to return to America with the intention of building the trade market in the Jamestown community. Through a series of events, he was able to return to his tribe in New England where he met a group of separatist called pilgrims who were trying to create a living in this new land. Squanto became an interpreter for them and taught them how to farm and trade with the other people of the land. A small detail of an ex slave just trying to survive and the rest is now history.
EXAMPLE #2 About 80 years before the Squanto pilgrim encounter, King Henry VIII wants to divorce his wife but the Catholic church wont allow it. To compensate for this travesty, the king starts his own religion, the Anglican Church. This sets off a chain of events over the next 70 years which includes, civil wars, the killing of a monarch (Mary Queen of Scott), the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the killing of many believers in the war over religion. If you lived during those 70 years it would be easy to believe that God was not doing anything and the devil was in control. King James ascended to the throne and wanted to stop the civil wars so to defeat the opposition, he request a political book be written to control the masses, The King James Bible. One group doesn’t care for the political side of religion and the Separate themselves from it all eventually leaving England for greener pastures in Plymouth America.
Sometimes it is easy to get discouraged about what is happening around us everyday, but God is in the details and “The wind of the Spirit is always blowing though we don’t know where it comes from”
Give thanks today for Ludwig and I agree “GOD IS IN THE DETAILS”