I spent part of a family vacation last month in rural Colorado. Since I live in the congested San Francisco Bay Area, I have few occasions in my regular life to experience what I did in that beautiful mountain state: vast stretches of grassland; remote, ice-capped peaks; and big, BIG sky.
The house I stayed in featured a second-story deck — a perfect spot from which to view my surroundings. I sat there nearly every day, my eyes on huge, panoramic cloudscapes, and the longer I stared, the tinier I became. At first, I distrusted the sensation of shrinking; it scared me. Eventually, though, something shifted. I let go, and the sky swallowed me whole. In those moments, I felt as though I were yielding to an older, wiser sense of proportion. Big sky. Small me.
In contrast, I spent another part of my vacation with my brother, sister-in-law, and their four children, the youngest of whom (Naomi) is just a year old. Since I hadn't seen her in several months, I had to work hard to win her over. I tried ice cream. I tried the ABC song. I tried, "This Little Piggy Went to Market."
Those went over okay, but I didn't really earn her interest until I remembered a game I'd played with my own children when they were babies. I crouched down in front of my niece, making myself as small as possible, and asked her a question. "How big is Naomi? How big is she?" Then I jumped into the air, threw my arms over my head, and cried, "Soooooo BIG!"
She loved it. After the third or fourth exclamation, she started throwing her arms up over her head, too, her face all smiles. By day three, she was lifting her arms up the second she saw me coming.
The irony, of course, is that Naomi isn't big; she's tiny. A tiny baby in a huge world. But the game insists on a truth I want her to know: She is big. She's essential and lovely, and her existence in this world matters.
"What are human beings that you are mindful of them?" the Psalmist asks as he contemplates the night sky. What are mere mortals that God cares for them?
The Psalmist's answer is as declarative as my game. "You have made them only a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet."
I think one of the tasks of my life is to find a decent balance between these two realities. "Small me" and "So big." If you and I are anything alike, we've got our work cut out for us. We tend to spend our days leaning too hard in one direction or another. As soon as we war successfully against insignificance, grandiosity steps onto the battlefield and kicks our butts.
My "small me" tends to sound much more like a "Woe is me!" Not a humble comprehension of my limits, not a grateful surrender to scale, but a self-pity party: "I've achieved nothing important! I'm practically invisible! My days are petty and miniscule! How have all these decades passed without my ACCOMPLISHING ANYTHING?"
My "so big" tends to be just as pathological. I infuse my life — every decision, every interaction, every relationship — with too many meanings and consequences. I'm not the duck who allows water to run down her back; I'm the duck who soaks in every sodden drop — and drowns. Why? Because I'm so important, right? The things I do have catastrophic implications.
God save me from myself.
In the Psalm I quoted above (Psalm 8), the poet grounds his reflections about humankind in the earth itself. It's in God's handiwork — the stars, the moon, the laughing mouths of babies — that our clues about scale lie. We are big and we are small — not in proportion to how much we aspire or achieve or flail or despair — but in accordance with our ordained place in God's universe. And — dare we believe this? — what God ordains in his universe is good.
It's good to be dwarfed beneath a big sky. To remember that I'm only here for a fleeting time, and that the supposed enormities of my life are tiny in God's patient eternity. It's good to feel small and young and new against the backdrop of the timeless.
And it's just as good to throw our arms up over our heads and bless each other with bigness. The older I get, the more I realize that there is no stage in life at which this message becomes peripheral. We need it always. The baby taking her first wobbly steps, the teenager angsting about his future, the stay-at-home dad facing a crisis of identity, the retiree looking back on her career with both pride and regret — all of us need to hear the Psalmist's blessing: "Look at you, you beautiful creation. Crowned with glory and honor. You are soooooo BIG."
Image credits: (1) Debie Thomas.
