Think Bigger

It’s late.  All five of our children have gone to bed and I still haven’t grasped the reality that I am the mother of 5 children.  I’m incredibly grateful but don’t think I’m responsible enough for this role.  I laugh to myself.  Now it’s just the two of us with our lights turned off, lying there side by side, a brown wrinkly shar-pei at our feet.  My mind has a tendency to run wild once my head hits the pillow and I don’t remember reaching both of my hands above my body, waving them in the air.  “Look at these 2 hands!” I tell Trey.  “How can I possibly love them all with only two hands?”  It’s dark so Trey can’t see my melodramatic hand motions or how my face starts to burn with anger but I’m sure he must feel my energy, how I’m torn up inside.  I have to bite my lip before I start saying stuff more stupid than I’ve already said.  I’m good at saying dumb things when I’m mad, things I end up regretting.  I get it.  Waves hit and deals fall through just like they do in the lives of us all but when you live my life, these fallen deals often leave me staring eye to eye with a whole village of suffering children and there’s nothing I can do to make it better and I’m not sure I’ll ever figure out how to properly deal with this.  I quietly melt angry into my bed.  I’m mad at the brokenness in this world but more than that I’m mad at my shallow attempt to take the faithless path in the face of this brokenness.  I’m mad that I want to choose the easier road in this moment at the expense of tossing out the dreams—the dreams I know were God-given gifts planted in my heart. 

The combination of being so close to Trey and frustrated almost always leads to me to revealing the ugly.  He’s my safe place like this.  Sure enough, the recipe was just right for me to pour out a little more. 

 “I’m thinking too big here.  Why do I do this?!  I’d do myself a huge favor if I could just figure out how to be content with caring for Pastor Nahum’s small band of orphans and forget about the rest of the children in his village.  There’s too many.  I can’t do it.”

Deep down I don’t mean what I just said about forgetting the rest of the village children and Trey knows this too.  Sometimes he just listens.  He doesn’t always say something back to me.  A minute passes and I’m not sure if he’s about to speak or if we’re going to just let the moment fade into the night.  He coughs a few times because he’s recovering from the flu and bronchitis then he clears his throat and in a raspy voice he says to me very matter of fact like, “You need to think even bigger.”

Even through his scratchy voice I could hear the confidence in his words. 

“Think bigger.  Stop looking at your hands.  God has this in His hands and it’s okay if we can’t see what’s next.  God always works it out.”

What he was telling me was more than just a rattling of cliché words in an effort to calm me down.  There was a gigantic faith behind the things he just said to me.  How does he do it?  I felt his faith drain straight through into my deep empty faithless places.  His words were soaking in, it was comforting, and I didn’t want to ruin it.  I decide not to say anything—the two of us breathing like one in the dark silence.  I stroke my fingers along his cheek, together our hearts are pure and trusting.  It could have ended there.  I was good now.  But he wasn’t finished.  Once more, slow, he repeats in a whisper, “Think bigger.” And it was in this last whisper that those words became forever tattooed on my soul.

Relief fills me and I realize again that Lord didn’t put me on this mysterious journey alone.  We travel together and our love grows—the kind of love that drives me to think bigger for all the needy children in Pastor Nahum’s village.