Little fish, little pond

Are there times you particularly ‘feel your size’ in the world?

That Grand Canyon feeling that your life is but a breathe in history’s timeline; your place in the world ever fleeting, finite and far from significant?

There are seasons that bring our boundaries closer and make us more aware of the space we occupy. For parents at home with babies and pre-schoolers, suddenly home and local surroundings become their world. For others, an illness renders life more limited.

While those lines increasingly condense and shrink, we can feel the pressure to find significance in the smallness of our space. We might perceive the weightiness of the significance of those ‘out there’- the big fish in the big pond.

Wherever we are, however big or small we feel in the place God has called us to be, the question is: how are we to seek significance that isn’t dependent on the size of space we have but rather by the eternal world beyond and eternal life we are called to.

Francis Schaeffer wrote on this using Moses’ sense of smallness as he cries out to God, ‘Who am I that I should go unto Pharaoh?’ Here was a man overwhelmed by his limits, blinded to the point of desperation and belief that God must have got it all wrong. Hearing the call of God and feeling utterly ill-equipped and unworthy. Feel familiar?

Perhaps you are thinking. That task God is asking from me is too big. That place I am meant to go is too far, too out of my depth, too intimidating. That’s for the big fish, big pond people.

Or maybe you are seeking comfort in the ‘bigger’ space you occupy in the world. Work, church, friends, family, hobbies. The multifaceted, dynamic, ‘full’ and busy life where you can serve, evangelise, use your gifts. But what if God asks you to change the boundaries, to give up one of your worlds?

You’re asking me to stay God? To remain in this situation? To leave this sphere of work or task, and focus on one? To stay home? To not pursue the role? Surely you can’t mean that God? Suddenly you feel constricted and sense the pressure to be more significant in a more ‘reduced’ kingdom sphere. The task is equally too big. The new, albeit ‘smaller’ space feels as well too out of depth, too intimidating. That’s for the little fish, little pond people surely Lord?

But if we are seeking our lives and living to find true significance and satisfaction, we must surrender our plots and purposes. We must seek and stay in the spaces gifted to us by the Lord alone.

As with Moses, it may be that we discover God has given us all we need to do this. He has gone before and already placed in our lives all we need in order to go, to stay, to serve where He alone calls. And when we feel the smallness of our spheres, the ‘ordinariness’ of our lives, God can show His kingdom values pump significance through. His extraordinary work in and through us.

Moses had wandered in the wilderness for forty years, using a walking stick to aid his steps. Suddenly, he finds himself holding the same ordinary piece of wood and watching as God transformed a lowly stick into a serpent. What had once been inanimate wood and served to help his walking, now became the means by which Moses confronted Satan’s servant Pharaoh and manifested the sovereign, overruling power and glory of God over the evil one’s schemes.

Imagine if we too had God’s kingdom perspective on our lives and spaces? What if we saw the extraordinary glory and power of God in our ordinary? What if we were aware of the significance of tenderly, consistently, lovingly looking after relationships God has entrusted to us; combatting the isolation, shame, neglect and harm that Satan seeks to instil in them?

What if we understood the commitment of being present in one place long enough to hear, listen and attend to the needs of those before us rather than being people who dash and rush around from one important business and busyness to another.

The obedience and faithfulness to listen to whether God is calling us to ‘go’ or ‘remain’ rather than mapping out our own route in the world or pushing our agenda on others?

Imagine if we saw ourselves as the ‘me of God’ in the place He wants us to be, rather than the ‘me of me’, or even the ‘me of another’ in the place I or another dictate?

As Schaeffer preached, with God, there are no little people, and no little places. Only by being what God wants you to be, where God wants you to be, can you find quietness and peace before Him in the midst of pressure and responsibility.

In God’s kingdom, the size of the space you or I occupy has little to do with eternal significance. In God’s kingdom, the significance and peace our souls seek is in the way of sacrificial surrender, servant-hearted listening and living before God alone.

We belong to God alone, and only in Him alone we find our home in this world, in life beyond and forevermore.

Schaeffer's thoughts can be found in 'No Little People, No Little Places' Crossway 2003

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Emily Lucas is married to Ben and together they have three children. She is Tutor for Women and Student Welfare at Union School of Theology where she mentors in Church History and Systematic Theology. Emily is also studying for her doctorate in Puritan Anthropology.

Views expressed in blogs published by the Latimer Trust are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Latimer Trust.