Small and Great

Track twelve is the gentlest song on the record, a deliberate rest. In the small hidden place, quiet life, quiet face. After the cross, the album turns to the people the cross is for, and it turns first to the ones nobody notices. Little hands, little voice, little faith, little choice. The smallest flame is still a light in the dark.

The title comes from Scripture's own pairing - small and great - and the song's claim is that God does not run the two-tiered system men always build. Every heart, just the same. Grace will fall like the rain, small and great, just the same. The tiny seed, the trembling heart, the hidden lives and unseen days - none of them are second class in the kingdom. None too small, none too late. I needed this song on an album so full of pulpits and cathedrals and thrones, because it quietly says the thing all of that grandeur forgets.

And the bridge says it plainly. Not the proud, not the throne, but the weak He will own. Not the loud, not the fame, but the ones who fear His name. That is the great reversal the whole gospel runs on. The man who spent years building a glass cathedral with his own name on the sky is, by now, singing about how God passes the cathedral by and stops at the trembling, the little, the unseen. Still He holds every heart. That is good news for exactly the people who assume it could not possibly be about them.