It is easy to think of God painting an evening sky impossibly beautiful, or to see His hand in the healing of a broken body, or in the birth of a new life. He seems conspicuous in the big moments. It can be hard to believe that He is just as involved in the details.

Every single thing that touches you filters through the trustworthy hand of God.

Great peace fills this truth. The Lord is just as intimate in what you consider the smallness of life though few of us perceive Him.

But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all your works. Psalm 73:28

The Lord is near to us. He is not far off. He is not aloof. We are not forgotten. The thought that God is only with us in bigness of life would eliminate Him from the majority of life, but He is not far off. He is near.

Joseph after living 17 years in his father’s house was sent by ill-intentioned brothers under the providential hand of God to Egypt as a slave. But Joseph remembered God and understood that God remembered Him. We know Joseph perceived the nearness of God, because of His statement at the point of reconciliation with his 10 estranged brothers (Benjamin, the youngest and full brother of Joseph, was not involved in the plot against Joseph’s life).

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. Genesis 50:20

Everything big and everything small the enemy of our souls, Satan, intends to harm us. In Christ, everything, every. single. thing. works together for our good, because God calls us according to His purpose to bring Himself great glory, to make us happiest in Him. This is our God in the details. Our God working every. single. thing. out that we think He doesn’t even know about.

The Lord is with us in the laundry, with us at the sink, with us as we take a small step toward daily discipline, with us when we choose the Spirit of Christ over our own propensities toward sin. He has always been there and just like Jacob at Bethel we did not perceive it.

Whatever place you are in, God is in that place.

Joseph lived in the mundane day in and day out. His was the life of a slave, the life of a servant and not for a short time. He was esteemed at work, then falsely accused and imprisoned. He served others by interpreting dreams and was subsequently forgotten for two years, 13 full years he lived as a slave.

No man remembered Joseph, but God remembered him.

And if God is for you, who can really be against you, and if you are forgotten by every man but remembered by God, what is there to fear?

And God is with you. Let Him into the smallness of your life, because what seems small to us is actually preparation for our life’s beautiful, eternally significant purpose. There is no exaltation without humiliation. There is no rising for the one not bowed low. Our lives individually serve humble purposes but when married to the story line of Christ, to the epic story of Scripture, we become major characters on the great scene of redemptive history, the triumphant story that will see salvation fully revealed and Christ’s kingdom fully come.