Everything in this story really happened. It wasn’t this time of year which is exactly why it’s a good story for January. At least if you have a hard time embracing this deep winter month like I do. I think bears have the right idea — hole up and avoid it altogether.

It was a sunny spring morning in Spokane. The dew in the grass sparkled like diamonds. My just-turned-six daughter and I stepped outside to take in the beauty.

“Those are God’s diamonds,” I told her.

She plucked a drop of moisture from a green blade and held it to the sun. Together we admired its shimmer.

A few weeks later our family was on our way to Alaska. Not to vacation — to live. Something I wasn’t all that excited about. It poured rain when we arrived. A soggy, dreary unwelcoming welcome wagon. I had this litany going in my mind, “This place is saying ‘go home, go home.’”

About the third day in our nothing fancy, new-to-us mobile home in the woods — having rented out our house in a friendly Spokane neighborhood — the sun finally appeared. I happened to be looking out the back window into the woods.

Actually, I was doing more than that. I was pleading with God, “You’ve got to help me. I can’t do this.”

My eye fell on a fat raindrop plopped on a leaf — a leftover from the storm. I wouldn’t have noticed it except the angle of the sun hit it so that the droplet danced like a diamond. Immediately I recalled the dew in the grass back in Spokane. God’s diamonds.

I heard in my spirit a simple statement, “I have diamonds for you here, too.”

I believed that word. Everything big about Alaska. Everything far away and lonely. Everything that seemed impossible just disappeared. I reached to God and said, “Okay.”

Alaska ultimately held fourteen years’ worth of diamonds. A veritable gem mine.

And I learned when something seems too big — too much — sometimes it just takes the smallest thing, in God’s hands, to convince me otherwise.