mountains out of molehills

It has struck me lately, how often I tend to make mountains out of molehills. I don't think this unfortunate tendency is my habit alone; but I think that we as a thinking community tend to place a lot of emphasis on the details, when perhaps we shouldn't. We over analyze every word, touch, glance. We attribute major feelings and intentions to the barest of efforts. In movies, in books, even in sermons, unraveling the plot of the narrative always seems to ride on the briefest glimpse of subtle action. The villain has been under our noses the entire time, and if we had paid more attention to his lisp, his tell, the fact that he doesn't make eye contact-- we would have known.

Society trains us to pay attention to the details. In magazines, blown-up images of celebrities' minuscule accessories, body language on vacation, loss or gain of 5 pounds-- this is reported as news. We infer from these details who is engaged to whom, sleeping with whom, who has serious eating or health issues. And so we learn to attribute great importance to things that should bear little importance. We lose sight of the big picture for the details. Who cares about these things more than the value of the person in question?

For me, this has translated into a compulsion to read meaning into meaningless things. And regardless of how much I try to logically disregard those meaningless things, I am incapable of letting them go at times. I feel myself becoming one of 'those women,' the kind who repeats every word, trying to extract a deeper meaning from what was spoken. The kind who picks up on a mere coincidental fact and turns it into fate. It's a dangerous place to be.

Even in my spiritual life, I take these coincidences and concurrences as signs from God. I pray about needing direction for my future and my eye falls on a bible verse in Jeremiah saying that God has a hope and a future for me. I start to feel convicted about debt and decide to get a job; the next day I come across a job advertisement. Even when I was coming to DC, I felt called to my church because it had the same name as my home church in Texas, the pastor was also a woman, and her name was the same as my name. Big decisions made on trivial details. (It is important to note that I also stayed because I felt God at work among the congregation and that I also felt at home and called to work there. But the draw to my church in the first place hasn't changed.)

I think it is beneficial to take notice of details. I think it is detrimental to associate more importance to those details than they are worth. It is time to strike a balance between attention and obsession. I understand God to be a God of the bigger picture and of the details also, but that merely means that God has control of it all, and less reason to worry. As I prepare over the course of the next three years for my journey, I hope I can remember to notice the details but not to make decisions on what I infer from them. I hope that I can learn to make fewer mountains out of molehills. Spend more time in conversation about things that deserve conversation and less thought and brainpower in pursuits that in the end, God will bend toward his will anyway. I want to hear beyond the diction and listen to what the speaker is really saying. I want to devote my energy to doing and not to wondering.

Except when wondering leads directly to doing.