The Big Moment

“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.”

—Luke 16:10

I love movies about “The Big Moment”—the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal that changes everything. I always wanted a movie-worthy event. I believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat.

The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them when, say, they win the Heisman. But even that football player is living a life of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous pearls. Strung together, lined up through the days and the years, they make a life. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies.

The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burger sounded like heaven. That big moment represented and rested on a foundation of moments that had come before it.