Beyond the Big Picture

“I don’t know if I should be asking you this,” my advisor paused in the middle of his question. The corners of his lips turned up slightly as I slid forward in my chair in the corner of his office. He always knows how to catch my attention, “But I am wondering what your thoughts are.”

“On…?”

“The big picture,” he said, “Beyond the obvious treatments.”

My advisor laughed as I went off on the implications of our signaling mechanism. What with my academic superpower of ADHD, I could probably go on for several hours with all of the unexpected connections I could make with my project and Cell Biology at large. For the sake of this post, however, I shall cut it off just as my advisor did.

“Still too many details. Think bigger.”

Being bogged down in the details is a common problem for scientists. We often hyper focus on our single mechanism, our single protein, our single hypothesis, our one thing for so long that we forget the bigger picture. Now this is not to say that we completely forget the implications of our work. How else would we able to provide a hook at the beginning of our grants in order to be funded?

Scientists rarely forget the big picture in terms of disease or the field. We forget that life is so much more than the single issues we focus on.

Life is complicated.

And yet with our reductionist approach, which is absolutely necessary in science, we tend to miss the connections that make our work valuable.

Missing the beyond the big picture is not just a problem for researchers. In fact, it is this detail oriented mentality which contributes to our decision to settle for less than what we really want in this life. Again, I will take the perspective of a Catholic.

We of the Faith were raised to see God in the little things. In the “whispering wind” as the Bible says.

It’s true: God is in the silence.

But…God’s bigger than all of the little things. He literally created the universe. So then, why should we be so naive as to say that He’s only present in the small things? Why would we spend so much time searching for Him in the details when we could look up and see Him before us? Why would we spend our time looking at little things?

Because we cannot handle the big things.

We are too hard of heart and too weak to see the Glory of God. Yet in His loving kindness, He gives us a glimpse of Himself in the little things. He puts Himself in the sunrise, in the stars, in the smiles, in the tears, in the dinners, and in the memories we hold most dear to us.

Our God is even in a tiny piece of bread.

But, like the Tardis, that piece of bread is much larger than we could ever understand in this life. However, if we live our heavenly lives as a Sunday to Sunday affair, then we will not see the bigger picture, let alone beyond the bigger picture.

We receive the little blessings, the small moments, the tiny piece of bread so that we can come to understand beyond the bigger picture.

But we need to step back and add up all of these moments with the divine so that we may understand Him more and more each day.

A little over a year ago, The Blessed Mother interceded for the first time in my Notre Dame life. This was the first of many miracles I have witnesses since that day, but until I was forced to think about “beyond the bigger picture,” I had not thought much about how these prayers, offered up daily for the souls of those around me, had turned in to an unexpectedly perfect connection.

Hundreds of unexpected moments. Some of them were joyful. Some of them were painful. All of them brought forth the revelation of God’s Creation.

God takes the unexpected and turns it in to the only logical conclusion.

But that was just the bigger picture.

As I looked back over the past year, I noticed something else at work in all of those moments. I saw souls that were hungry for love and acceptance coming together. I saw souls getting healthier, stronger, and happier than ever before. Even though many of the souls were struggling, there was a sense of an all-abiding joy in the community.

I saw the name of Jesus Christ coming in to conversation. With each miracle, God made His Kingdom come. 

That is what was beyond the bigger picture: Heaven.

“There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and spent all she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind Him in the crowd and touched His cloak…He looked around to see who had done it. The woman, realizing what had happened to her, approached in fear and trembling. She fell down before Jesus and told Him the whole truth.’

‘He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.” (Mark 5:25-34)

The woman in the Gospel was not only suffering a great physical pain, but she also was ritualistically unclean. Therefore, she could not be with her family and friends. She could not socialize. She could not worship. She was an outcast.

She gave all she had, save for an encounter with God Himself.

What makes this act greater than what meets the eye is the intentionality of the woman. Certainly she believed that Jesus could heal her. However, she did not seek out a great physical act. Instead, the woman believed that even the smallest moment with Jesus could become far greater than the biggest moment of her life.

She did not confine Jesus to the expected.

She did not expect Him to have to touch her. Instead, she saw beyond the bigger picture.

I think we all live a little like this woman. We seek God in the little things, expecting to only see the tiniest of glimpses of Him. We expect God to be smaller, to be hidden, to be silent. However, if we expect nothing from God but for Him to love us, each of these little moments become part of something greater. 

Each moment, good or bad, can be made beautiful through the love of God.

So let us stop seeking only the glimpses of Heaven. Let us stop trying to make ourselves bigger than God’s grace, found in these little moments. Let us stop pretending that we might miss God’s presence if we aren’t looking in to all of the little details every second every day. Let us stop bogging down in the small.

Let us become small and God become great in our hearts.

Then, as we add up all of the small moments we can recognize, our Jesus will show us just how many more we missed. He will raise us up, make us great, and change our lives for the better.