just be here
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I’ve just come home from a weekend at home—which is an odd-sounding statement, now that I’ve written it, but nonetheless true. I am in my home as I type this, and yet I was at home twelve hours and two hundred miles ago as well, home in the house I grew up in and with the people who know me best.
This tension always makes me wonder if we were meant to live like this, separated from our people. For most of human history we’ve lived in tight-knit communities, from the familial clans of the patriarchs to small colonial towns. With industry and progress and technology have come a much larger world, for better or worse. Now we hardly bat an eye at the idea of living states or even continents away from our parents, maintaining our relationships almost entirely by digital means. Those of us in the suburbs often live a stone’s throw from houses full of people we’ve never met beyond a “hello” on the way to the mailbox—people whose pantries we can’t imagine borrowing from, people we’d never dream of asking to babysit our children, people who might not even answer the door if we’d locked ourselves out of our house without a phone late at night (ask me how I know).
I walk through my neighborhood and see large houses full of stuff and empty of people, divided by tall fences. I walk through my grocery store and hope I don’t see anyone I know that I might have to make small talk with. I wonder how to fix it, even as I perpetuate it. Community, generosity, hospitality—these are all such warm kingdom words, and I long for them, but still instinctively steel myself against them, because as warm as they are, they’re not safe.
Perhaps what my generation missed, with all its Do Hard Things and Radical and “You were made for more,” is that the opulent, individualistic, global Western lens through which we view concepts like “hard” and “radical” and “more” renders our interpretation utterly different from that of Christ. We tend to think only of going bigger and better, when the truly hard and radical thing to do is get smaller.
Smaller is harder. More intimate, more vulnerable, more terrifying. It’s harder to share the Good News with someone you see every day, because they will immediately measure your life against your creed. It’s harder to commit yourself to a tiny, local assembly of believers, because they will soon be elbows-deep in the muck of your life. It’s harder to serve your own immediate family faithfully day in and day out, because the very people we love the most can be hardest to love when it’s an every-minute-of-every-day demand on our energy.
I’d love to think that the most important thing for me to do is shatter the universe with wisdom shouted from a platform overlooking millions—grand and impersonal, safe from the discomfort of being known, set up on a pedestal to be admired from afar—but in the words of John the Baptist, “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30).
Even Jesus modeled the power of small. The effects of His ministry were universe-shattering, of course, but the means were hardly grand. Twelve men. Just three in His closest circle. He let them watch Him, learn from Him, live with Him for three years. In the end, it was one of these men who betrayed Him, and it was the other eleven who carried His mission forward into the next two thousand years.
In our day of Twitter and virtual-everything and Church, Inc., it’s so easy to forget that every massive work of God in the Bible started small and moved slowly. He multiplied Abraham in to a nation over the course of four centuries, most of which the Israelites spent in slavery. He relentlessly pursued and tirelessly loved that nation through a thousand years of rebellion, repentance, idolatry, exile, and return. He finally sent the Messiah in the form of an embryo who would take 40 weeks to develop and be born a baby—a baby who would then take 30 years to mature into ministry. And He’s been continuing that ministry now for more than two millennia.
God is on a different timeline than I am. Even if I do the biggest, wildest things with my life, it will still be miniscule when it plays out on His stage. My 27 years, or 87 if I’m given them, can never be more than a blink when the scope is this large.
So I will just be, and I will just be here: faithful and small, loving my little circles well, knowing that God created me with limits but that when I am obedient in my limited part, He can better do His work in the infinite whole.
