Once again God has hemmed me in with limitations. Until this last year my life had if not fewer, at least different limitations. In Oregon, I had job with what seemed like unlimited contact with people. Each term there were new groups of students, each like a strange new planet. Teckla and I lived in a rambling four-bedroom house with a yard and garden. We shared the house with our son Peter and his son Ari, and an unruly Doberman named Pharaoh.
I was rooted in two churches and a men’s Bible Study that had met for years. Three Sundays each month we attended the little Nazarene Church across street–a church my father pastored for several years in the seventies. We had friends and saw those friends regularly. Once a month, I preached at the local Presbyterian church—a place full of wonderful people.
We were also rooted in the beaches, forests, and creeks we haunted. I can still tell you where the trout lilies, grass widows, and larkspur bloom on Euphoria ridge. On the beaches I know the best places to find sea stars and anemones, the places to get out of north wind that whistles down the beach in the summer.
All that has been left behind for a two-bedroom townhouse in the suburbs. Ari has been adopted and we gave up Pharaoh. This might be the first time in our married life that Teckla and I are living alone. Even though Dylan and Vanessa and their four kids live only a couple blocks away, it is odd for it to be just us.
Although we are free of parental responsibilities, a dog, and a job, Teckla’ dementia presents more limitations each day. The usual formula of retire and travel will not work in our life’s equation. The things time and money make possible must be surrendered.
God is like a photographer who keeps zooming in for a close-up and cuts more and more out of the frame. Of course, for both paintings and photographs, what is left out is as important as what is put in. A skilled photographer can snap a picture of something we see everyday and make us feel that only now do we really see it. A still life of an apple can make us see apples for first time. The limits of the frame help us see clearly.
We live in a culture that hates limits and celebrates personal autonomy as the highest good. But the limits that God uses to frame our lives should be embraced—it is what gives meaning and beauty to our lives. God calls us to love—and love places limits and demands on our lives. When we adopted and then homeschooled four boys, we embraced a slew of limits on our time and finances. It was hard, and it was wonderful.
What is marvelous and mysterious is that when God enters into our picture even the smallest place with tightest frame becomes panoramic. I see clearly his presence in my life over the years, and a whole universe of eternity opens for before me as death and resurrection move closer. As the frame gets smaller, the picture gets bigger. When God is with us, nothing good is truly or forever lost.
So much has been pared away from our lives—in Teckla’s case even memories—that it feels like God is asking, “Are you ready for your close-up?” Teckla is certainly ready. I am sprucing up my heart and trusting God to frame the picture perfectly.
This time of year we celebrate how God framed love and salvation with a stable. A manger framed the Ancient of Days and King of Kings. And in the smallest place we see the greatest glory.
