Little is much with the right heart

​My friend Brenda has miniature horses. For as long as I've known her I've never quite understood it. Why would someone have miniature horses when they could have the giant version?

To be fair, she does have giant horses. But she never talks about them with the same affection she does her smaller friends. She rattles off their names to me like a proud parent rattles off the names of their kids.

She shared a story this morning, though, that has me thinking I may have been overlooking the giantness in her mini friends.

Brenda hosts camps for young people at her family's farm. Yesterday, as part of a culminating camp activity, Brenda and her campers loaded up the minis and took them to visit residents of a local nursing home.

The young people learned how to transport the miniature horses from farm to nursing home. Brenda worked with the young people on how to talk to strangers about their horses.

I couldn't help but imagine it, though. The hearts of these folks in the nursing home. Many of them rarely seeing visitors. But here come visitors, and they have these tiny little horses walking right beside them.

Maybe many of them have never seen visitors quite so unique?

I've come to believe loneliness is our greatest shared affliction. It's hard to overstate the healing these tiny horses and tiny humans likely brought to many people yesterday.

It's also hard to overstate just how much Brenda is doing in these young people's lives to prevent their own future loneliness. Many of us are lonely because we have relationship patterns that make it difficult to connect with other people.

What a gift she is giving to these young people, shaping relationship patterns that see the beauty in other people. And horses. No matter how big or small or young or old.

In a world that is often obsessed with knowing the true beauty of all we do - beauty somehow has to be counted and measured and in an official report somewhere for the beauty to be called beautiful - it's nice to simply imagine the depth of beauty.

It's nice to imagine the memories the folks in the nursing home have now. It's nice to imagine the stories they'll tell each other and their friends and families about those kids and those mini horses (maybe they'll even remember their names like Brenda does 😊).

It's nice to imagine the impact on those young people. How many will want minis of their own someday? How many have a grander interest in visiting nursing homes or people in general? How many of them no longer see a a couple of weeks at camp as an adventure, but as a way to make the world better?

It's nice to imagine the impact on my friend Brenda, who has never fully seen the depth of the good she does for the world. Her and those undersized horses of hers...

It's nice to imagine the impact on you. Maybe you have some miniature idea in your heart that is just waiting to make a giant impact on the world. It's simply waiting for you to feel the giantness in it.

I encourage you, don't leave it in your heart! It becomes giant in the sharing.

Load it up and take it to the world.

I don't know what kind of beauty will come from it. I don't need to know. And neither do you.

You simply need to be able to imagine it.

And then load up and go.