small spaces

I met a writer last Friday, Ann Voskamp, who has a very successful book, One Thousand Gifts. There is a reason it is successful, and I don't think it's because someone has branded her or she has a Facebook account or that the cover of the book is elegant. God honors content. He shows himself best in the simple beauty of truth told well.

Here is what she told me that most encouraged me. During the interview she related that her husband doesn't read much other than the local farm newspaper and his Bible. But he built her a cabin on the edge of a cornfield. It's a 10X10 space where she comes empty each evening and pours out her heart on the page.

I'm encouraged by that because the space where I do what I do is small, on the edge of the desert, at the back of the home we're renting, in a place that is not holy or glitzy or glamorous. It's plain and mean and hot when the sun beats against the outer wall.

Yet, in this space, I ask God to inhabit every day. And he does, because he has made his dwelling in me. Unbelievable. That God would become a man, the infinite in a small space. That God himself would suffer for me, all powerful Creator, bearing my guilt on two crossed beams.

I think God delights in using our small spaces. Small tasks. Small minds. When God looks our way he does not see how small the space, he only sees the possibility of what might happen in that space. The little boy's lunch that fed a few thousand people. That's what I have at my disposal every day.

So I'm trying, again, not to look at the small space I have been given, but at the big God who wants to inhabit it.

May Jesus inhabit the small spaces of your life today.