Faithful in a Little Thing
When I went into the kitchen on Sunday morning, I found Ray doing one of his Sunday morning chores—filling up the pill containers with supplements and prescriptions. He fills up his and mine, too, every week, something I deeply appreciate. He makes sure to keep those pills and supplements ordered, too. I thought the scene deserved a photo, so here is Ray at precisely 6:50 a.m. faithfully doing this normal weekly chore in his PJs.
These daily day/night pill containers reside in a cloth cylinder case with a zipper. Ray’s is heather gray and mine is black. They are the best we have ever had. Around our house, we call it a SMTWTFS, pronounced “smit-wit-ifs,” which is what Ray’s daddy christened these handy devices (After all these years, I still can’t pronounce it!). Wes’s faithful son used to fill his SMTWTFS, too.
I am sharing this photo with you because Ray was faithfully taking care of something important for himself and doing a great kindness to me. Week after week Ray is faithful in this “little thing.”
In the gospel of Luke, Jesus taught:
He who is faithful in a very little thing
is faithful also in much;
and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing
is unrighteous also in much.
Luke 16:10
A crucial task when rearing children is training them to follow through on little tasks as well as big ones. There’s more glamour in finishing an art project than in putting the crayons away, but somebody has to put the crayons away. Children need gentle and consistent training to do the little things.
Crayon drawing in a school in Greenbelt, Maryland, 1939,
photo by Arthur Rothstein,
courtesy of the Library of Congress
They need an early lesson in this proverb:
In all labor there is profit,
But mere talk leads only to poverty.
Proverbs 14:23