When I let my emotions build up into an unstable tower that inevitably crashes down on me, I am crushed. When I wake up in the morning and my to do list looms large, I want to curl up in a ball under the covers and never come out. When I open my computer and discover that there has been another natural disaster or act of senseless violence, I feel myself shrinking in the face of such pain.

There is a lot out there that’s big: Huge storms, Massive acts of terror, Mega doubts and fears on a personal and global scale. The list of enormous things to worry about is itself truly gargantuan. And these monsters can make me feel so tiny and trivial, until I remember that the Lord is in charge, and He dwarfs them all.

The Lord is so pervasive and so profoundly present in all things that I can forget He’s there, which is crazy because He truly is the biggest thing there is. He is everything good and true and wonderful in this world and beyond. And you know what’s even crazier? He took the time to make us. He made me. This all-knowing, ever-present almighty Creator took the care and attention to make simple, seemingly insignificant me. Sure, it is no great feat for someone so powerful to make a human being, but the fact that He chooses to make each of us in His own image and keeps doing it, no matter how much we mess up the world, means that we matter. We truly matter. And that makes us big too. Continue reading David Was a Giant Too →

A couple weeks before Christmas, we were getting ready to host a long-anticipated cocktail party at our house. My husband and I were a great team trying to get Christmas lights up, clean the house, and prep food for the occasion. Unfortunately, our toddler’s molars decided to make a ferocious push for the surface and we had to juggle a miserable little girl on top of all of the chores. We felt helpless. We kept giving her homeopathy and snuggles whenever we could, but sometimes she was completely inconsolable. Our usually cheerful munchkin was as fragile as could be and even though I was anticipating a festive event that evening, I could feel myself fraying at the edges. She skipped her nap entirely—something she hadn’t done for months, so she was completely exhausted on top of the pain and there was nothing we could do about it except desperately try to make it to bedtime.

A little before dinner, she really fell apart. We had already tried all sorts of distractions and remedies throughout the day and were running out of ideas. I decided that she had been cooped up in the house for a while, so I was going to bundle her up and take her for a walk outside to look at Christmas lights. The battle that ensued was utterly unprecedented. It took both my husband and I to wrestle her into warm clothes as she kicked and screamed. My patience and heart were breaking. Continue reading Teething →