Eavesdropping

Snippets

Greek philosophy
Cartoon cats
Writer’s club syllabus
Early pregnancy woes

Post maternity leave
Girl power
Feminist rampant
Swine flu, malaria
And friends in Afghanistan

All snippets overheard
On the early morning train
Snippets of life
Folk revealed
Confidences shared
Even if they weren’t meant to be

And those were just the conversations going on around me
Haven’t even got to the mobile phones yet
Those one-sided encounters
That are so scarily illuminating
Or so crushingly boring

All this drama
Accompanied by the steady rhythm of the train
Eating up the miles
Ferrying folk to work and play

So much going on in such a small space.
Multiply that a million times over
In every part of the world
All hours of the day and night

Is this what it’s like for God?
A constant bombardment of noise
And activity
Snippets of all sorts
Assaulting the divine ears
Maybe
But I prefer to think of a much more serene picture
Of a lot more sifting
A lot more sorting
And an awful lot more sense
Being made of our random lives


And the encounters that are so brief
So uninvolved
Those snippets met with little interest in the morning rush hour
I like to think of
As being vitally important
To the God who deals in trivia
And for whom everything matters
I’d love to know what that God makes of all these snippets
Meantime, I’ll just imagine
And boggle at how fascinating they must be
And give thanks that they do matter to someone

(Liz Crumlish August 2009)