Tiny Little Box
By Echo Vetter
I grew up in a tiny little box.
This tiny little box served me fairly well for about two decades. It taught me ideas about things like a Creator God and a Savior Jesus. It taught me that my actions matter. It taught me the words faith and hope and love. I like these things. I have held on to these things.
For almost two decades I believed that my tiny little box was the universe. I believed that my paradigm was the universe’s paradigm.
And then real life began to happen. Life that unraveled me and made me question and rethink everything. As I did I noticed that gradually, sitting in my tiny little box became less and less comfortable.
Life happened and people happened and stories happened and one day I looked around and realized that now I had things that didn’t fit into my tiny little box anymore. Soon I began thinking, “Where am I going to put these things?? It is so cramped in here! How am I going to stay in here if I can’t fit all of my things in here?”
Those were my first moments of realizing that the box even existed. And once I discovered the box existed, I quickly learned that there was a whole lot of space outside of the box, something I had never before considered.
I imagine the moment a baby leaves his mother’s womb and enters the great big world, feels a lot like I felt in those first moments of peering outside my box. “It’s scary out there! It’s so big and bright and noisy! It is not warm and dark and cozy and safe.”
But just as an infant cannot stay in his mother’s womb forever, I could not stay inside my box.
It’s been over ten years now and occasionally I have found myself trying to climb back inside. For a moment I will find myself believing that I am safer inside walls that are so small they touch every side of me. But this is only because I am still learning to live outside my box. Maybe I always will be.
I am still learning to live inside humility instead of arrogance.
Still learning to live with more questions than answers.
Still learning to choose compassion instead of judgement, freedom rather than fear, believing in place of “knowing”, faith in the absence of certainty.
Still getting comfortable in a world that is rainbow colored instead of black and white.
Sometimes I miss my box. But then I remember that I am small while He is big, I exist in time and space while He is everlasting. I have been called to a life of love, omniscience is not my burden to bear.
And that remembering allows me to exhale, to snuggle down into freedom and cuddle up to the relief of not having to have everything figured out.
This relief gives me the energy for grace. And kindness. And compassion.
And though I have found that grace is more of a mountain top, with sweeping views and breathtaking heights, steep hills and gusty winds, I will dwell here gladly. It is a beautiful, beautiful place to be.
Originally published at ifthoumayest.wordpress.com on February 18, 2016.
