What size are you?
Also: my conversation with Malcolm Guite and a redemptive visit to my father's grave
Are you small, medium, large, extra large? Tall? Petite?
Are you big or little? Short or tall?
What size are you?
There are so many ways to answer that question, right?
Well, here’s one: I’m day size…and so are you.
Many people imagine they are something other than day size, but there’s no escaping it. We are built to live one day at a time. It is one of the ways we know we are human. We live one day at a time. That’s the size we are. Day size.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about our day size when he counsels us not to worry about tomorrow. Matthew 6:34 records Jesus saying, “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” There it is: day size.
Psalm 90 verse 12 asks God to “teach us to number our days, that we might gain a heart of wisdom.” The value of every day is hard to weigh and when a day is gone, it’s gone forever. Literally history. And if we’re blessed to awaken the next day, we have precious few hours to spend on the one non-renewable resource of this gift we call life.
What will you do with the day? What will you make of it? How will you spend it? No measure of it should be spent worrying, Jesus says, deal with the trouble of today and that will be enough. We cannot control the future anyway. So, our attention should be trained upon the present - the present moment, the present circumstances, the present opportunities, the present presence of the living God. He is not day sized! And that’s worth spending part of the day considering!
“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
Lamentations 3:22-23.
God’s grace and forgiveness are given fresh every morning, designed to last just for that day, and He never runs out. Think about that! God knows we are day size and He provides for us every day.
Maybe that was part of the lesson of the manna in the wilderness. Remember that? In Exodus 16 we read about how the Israelites survived as they wandered in the wilderness. Day after day after day, the people of God ate the bread that fell from heaven— literally their daily bread. He commanded them to gather only enough for one day at a time to develop within them a daily rhythm of dependence upon God. As we pray the Lord’s Prayer, “give us this day our daily bread,” we echo that confidence in God’s provision and our daily dependence on Him.
If there’s something in your life that seems bigger than the day, I invite you to turn it over to God. He can handle it and He knows you’re day-sized. He made you that way. And He cares for you as His little one.
Whatever day you’re living through right now, there’s also this: by tomorrow, it will be a brand new day. We live this day in light of another day. A day that’s coming when the worries of this day will be no more. Until that day, I’ll be praying for you day by day and trust that you’ll do the same for me.
Blessings on this day from one day-sized child of God to another…..
Carmen
Carmen’s Reading List:
In this case, we should say listening list, because Malcolm Guite’s Galahad and the Grail is the first of a four-part epic ballad, and it is meant to be read aloud.
Malcolm spoke with me recently on The Reconnect, during which he read aloud the prelude (or, the call to “take up the tale”). If you listen, you will see what he means, that some words are just not “alive on the flat page…. but need to be woken up and breathed into being by human voice.” What a gift!
He also talks about recovering the biblical connects at the center of the King Arthur stories and how we can each take part in “un-disenchanting” our modern era by reviving wonder:
“I don’t think we need to re-enchant the world. I think the world is as enchanted as ever. God has filled it with beauty and that beauty rouses a desire for us, what C.S. Lewis calls the yearning for the far off country. We want somehow to get to where the beauty comes from.”
Read or listen to my interview with Malcolm Guite:
Keeping up with Carmen…
In Brook, Indiana
I had the occasion to be with my sister in Brook, IN, where our dad is buried alongside his parents. I was 15 when he died, and Mother’s Day weekend has always been shadowed by that fact. But this year was very redemptive as we celebrated a family wedding in the next generation Fowlers. I am very thankful.
The photo of our hands on his gravestone is important to me because after my dad died, my mom had rings made for my sister and I that replicate the only ring my dad ever wore.
In case you missed it:
This month I published a three-part series, Tying the Knot, looking at marriage and what the Bible says about God’s love for us.
