Minutia
I sweat the small stuff.
Little things get to me. Symmetry or asymmetry can ruin my hour. A carelessly destroyed pattern is mortally distracting. Aesthetic matters a great deal.
I claim the OCD label when others apply it to me with pride — even though I don’t feel disorderly. In fact, the times when people are using it against me as if a weapon, it is generally an observation to my response to disorder.
At last night’s church council meeting we were invited to make an observation about the person next to us and connect it to a Christ-like attribute. One person observed this aesthetic value about myself, and imagined that such concern must have been Christ-like. I was humbled and appreciative of this.
I contrast it to another conversation I had with a person about the awful clash of our choir’s robes during Advent and Lent. The robes themselves are a rather attractive hunter green, but the stole overlay during Advent and Lent is a royal purple. “Who cares, we’re not very fashionable,” this person said to me.
I think these things matter. Beauty matters. Distraction matters by its very nature. There are any number of distractions that cannot be controlled, inter alia, what a person brings as part of herself, the colloquial “baggage” of a person; the particular grouping of individuals into a collective momentary assembly or ongoing community; natural disaster.
When one is distracted in a program, event, activity, forum, assembly, or other gathered function, by something within the control of the host, that person is disrespected. That one is excluded from full participation. Their experience is tarnished. The host is subliminally communicating, “Good enough is good enough; the best is not good enough for you, let alone ourselves.”
My significant other allows me to rant about California traffic signs while we are driving. He thinks there are bigger issues about which to be concerned than inconsistent typefaces, spacing, crowding, amount of information, how and where directional arrows are placed, quality of materials, etc. In the grand expanse of life he is partly true: there are numerous other issues that, admittedly, have a greater direct impact on the social compact, human rights, government, or human relations. But I still maintain that the little details matter a great deal. Minutia is hardly minute.
During high school and college I worked for a major national retailer. During the closing shift we were responsible for “zoning,” the term for the retail activity where employees go across the sales floor and appropriately place merchandise in its spot on the shelf. I was frequently the last person complete with my zoning assignment, but consistently I was praised for the thoroughness of my zone. Meticulously I pulled every item forward on the shelf, not just the front facing item. I aimed to perfectly align the left edge of the item with the left edge of the shelf label. I frequently do my shopping in the early opening hours of stores — including that same chain — and to this day I am annoyed when it is apparent the previous evening’s crew didn’t care enough to even make a half-assed attempt of pulling the front line of items forward.
I think such attention to detail — such concern for things deemed to be too small to be of importance — is a Christ-like activity. Perhaps that person in the church council meeting last night was correct, adjusted for different times and lifestyles. I’m not sure if Jesus would walk through big box stores fussing about zoning, or if he would become visibly upset looking at a string of burned-out light fixtures, or if a lack of adequate and intuitive signage would cause him to ask to speak with managers, directors, or other decision-makers to lodge a complaint. But elevating the small to the big, making major that which is minor — these are examples I see of Jesus in the Gospels.
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Daniel Ross-Jones serves as Minister for Youth & Young Adults at First Congregational Church of Palo Alto, United Church of Christ. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for a time still measured in months, he is frequently getting lost and discovering treasures of a landscape very different from his Upper Midwestern roots. Green Jello Hotdish is a blog exploring the intersections of his days. 
