A few weeks ago I ordered a miniature house kit. Sam and I spent ten nights building it together. I recorded our daily progress along with close-ups of the finished sushi restaurant in the video below!
I was a bit rattled when the package arrived: the box had gotten pretty banged up in transit. But I couldn’t be bothered to return it, so we just dove straight into building, and right up until the very last piece we were both worried something might be missing. Thankfully, every single part was in the box, and it even came with tweezers, though we had to supply our own scissors and white glue.
The most fun part was making the sushi! For the nigiri, both the fish and the rice were made out of felt. We’d glue two pieces of felt together, cut them into a long strip with scissors, and then snip that into bite-sized pieces. For the nori rolls, we’d back the felt with black paper first, then actually roll it up the way you’d roll real sushi. Once the food was made and set on the plates, the final touch was sprinkling on green powder for wasabi, yellow powder for pickled ginger, and some red powder whose exact flavor I still can’t identify.
So cute, right?
The piece that frustrated me most was the sake bottle from day five, especially the one with the character “濤” written on it. The bottle itself was a hollow bead, and we had to glue a toothpick into the center of the bead to create a protruding effect, then wrap it in gold foil, and finally tie it up with string and knot it. Every single step was maddeningly difficult: either the toothpick would slip out of place, or the knot just wouldn’t hold. It took forever, but we finally got through it.
On the nights we worked on the miniature, it felt like stepping into the Room of Spirit and Time: time would just fly by. Building the model wasn’t just a great way to zone out; every so often, some strangely profound thought would surface too. One night, while wrestling with some tiny piece in my hands, I suddenly remembered this verse: “We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.” I felt like I could understand, just a little, what that might feel like from God’s side.
If one day my salmon nigiri got full of itself and turned to the tuna nigiri next to it and said, “Ha, I’m way better than you,” I’d probably scoop it right off the plate and send it to stand in the corner and think about what it did.
And if my little plant piece put itself down and said, “The restaurant would be better off without me,” I’d probably say, quite sadly, but I cut you out leaf by leaf with my own hands: the restaurant wouldn’t be complete without you!
If that’s how I feel, how much more must God feel the same way.
Lastly, here’s a photo of Godzilla (?) attacking the sushi restaurant:
NB: This article was first published in Chinese on 07/14/26. It was later translated with assistance from AI tools, edited by me, and published in English on 07/19/26.