Small Worlds

Sometimes the simplest thoughts are the most profound. I came across one of those yesterday that set me thinking in lots of different directions. In his blog for yesterday, Mike Cope said, “In small worlds, miniscule differences look VERY LARGE” (emphasis his).

I grew up in a small world. It was a great place to grow up. It was very safe, secure, and certain. I guess it was around about the eighth grade that my world started to get larger. I joined the debate team at my school, and most weekends found us traveling to such exotic locations as Nashville, Memphis, and Birmingham. When I spent three weeks in Washington, D.C. at the age of fifteen without my parents, I may as well have been going to a different planet; it was that different from anything I had known before. In my college years, I made it to Australia, and afterwards to New Zealand for three years. I discovered Oceania. Grad school led me to Africa and, well, here I am. And while I’ve been here, I fell in love with a beautiful Singapore girl, so now Asia has come into my world. I think my world has gotten pretty big, not just through travel, but even more so by the people I’ve met.

I am entirely in agreement with what Mike was trying to say about seeing our differences in perspective – that we need to focus on what we have in common – especially among those in the same religious tradition – than on our differences. As my world has gotten larger, I’ve seen more and more those points of contact, and found a kinship with those whom I would have regarded as anathema in my growing-up years. We have far more deadly enemies, and whether or not we feel we can always join forces, we need to realize that many others out there are fighting a common enemy, and serving a common Commander.

Mike’s observation also made me think of movies like A Bug’s Life and Antz, where whole communities carry out their activities in their microcosmic worlds, with little knowledge of the world around them. Each blade of grass, each leaf, and each bug is HUGE; the differences that we do not notice, make a difference to those involved.

So, I guess I’d just like to say that we need to realize that those miniscule differences to look and are indeed large, from a certain perspective. I need to understand how things look from that point of view.

Sometimes I miss my small world. For insiders, the sense of community in a small world is very heartening. In many ways, my large world community is much bigger, but it is not nearly as intimate. What I long for – and sometimes achieve – is small world intimacy with a large world perspective; a perspective that lets me see that my world is not so far apart from many others.