Hey, it’s me. I’ve been sick for days.
Seems like lots of my friends are falling apart in different ways, too.
What’s a girl to do?
It used to be I felt like I had to fix everything. I had to be the hero. And when anything came of it, I’d feel like a martyr. Yay me. Not.
Truth is, what people need isn’t me. And if I convinced people they did need me, I’d be so so tired. The last thing you want is the world depending on you as you try to hold all things perfectly together. You’re setting yourself and everyone else up for failure.
I’ve been thinking about this year. It’s the end of the year, and I feel incomplete. Part of my incompleteness is my incomplete memory of what even happened this year. Even when I remember events, I can’t begin to comprehend the caliber of what has come to pass.
Personally, I’ve left a job, gone to Israel, started a new job, gave away a car, bought a new car, left a church family, helped start a new church, met a fellow, and had my one and only golden birthday. If that all happened in just my life, what about the world? Turmoil in Israel (after I left, thank God), state elections, economy shifts, Sony hacks. How am I supposed to cram all that into my little heady-head?
I have incomplete knowledge. Perspective. Feeling, even. No — feeling especially. Most of the time these days, to be honest, I’ve just felt numb. I hate that word.
I hate to be numb. But that’s me these days.
There’s something I’ve read about in the Bible called a “portion.” It’s the Goldilocks golden rule of “not too hot, not too cold, but just right.”
Take for example, the fullness of our days. They can seem too full. They can seem too empty. If they aren’t just right, for me, I go to bed and find guilt lying there on the other side.
My sister Carrie says she’s prone to sloth. What an ugly word. I sometimes have seen her overcompensate and be ridiculously busy. Busy busy busy. Equally ugly.
What is my portion?
I’m small. I’m so small. I’m not superhuman. I’d like to think I’m more capable than most people, but that’s just a lie my individualistic, competitive culture tells me to justify my paradoxical underestimation of people and impossibly high standards of myself and everyone around me.
I’m small, but there’s still things I can do.
Have you ever set out to do a project in a day and it takes you more like a month? You get so sad. But what’s the problem with that?
Why do we rush things?
Why do we only call things “miracles” if they’re built in a day?
Wasn’t Rome a miracle, too?
It was a terrible miracle. But it didn’t even last as long as the kingdom I’m helping to build.
And this blasted website. It’s nowhere near up to my impossible standards, like the rest of my life. But this year was the year I got this website in the first place.
And you. Whatever project you’re working on. Relationship that’s struggling. Aspect of life that seems utterly unredeemable.
Will you dare with me to give it time?
Will you dare with me to stop carrying the thing on your small, small shoulders and delegate the big things to God?
Will you dare with me to stop being numb and apathetic because you can’t handle the weight of your world?
Don’t you dare stop caring. Don’t you dare play God and pretend you can fix it all. You be you. Not too hot, not too cold.
Let God be Papa Bear to drink the hot porridge and sit on the Big Chair.
And you?
You can sit next to him. Go ahead. Take your place on that just-right chair.
Rejoice that you’re not the hero, that you’re not the Papa Bear. What a relief for you!
And rejoice that you still have
a shoulder
and a mind
and a heart
big enough.
Big enough to care, even if you can’t care for all 7-billion of us at once.
You resemble him, and isn’t that enough?
It’s just right.
So next time you’re feeling incomplete (and I write this to myself) —
when the healing hasn’t come yet
and you’re about to cough up a lung,
when your family
or your business
or your marriage aren’t what they used to be,
give a guy His portion. It’s okay to be small.
Small but not insignificant. Never, not for a fleeting little moment, you hear?
Moments are small
but nothing big
has ever happened
outside of these 24-hour walls.
Be patient with yourself and others.
Bear with the other bears,
and even the goldie-locked intruders.
The fact that it didn’t happen today
is by no means evidence
that it never will.
Just promise me you won’t wait and, in your waiting, conclude that it will never happen.
Because nothing is more inevitable than those
relentlessly hoped-for,
far-too-long-awaited,
very-last-resort,
no-plan-B
miracles.
You can bet your big, little life on that.
“I cry to you, Lord;
I say,
‘You are my refuge,
my portion
in the land of the living.’”
// Psalm 142:5
