The God of Small Beginnings

 

For who has despised the day of small things? – Zechariah 4:10

Humans love to do things in a big way.

We're always searching for the breakout audience, the bright lights, and those fifteen minutes of fame. If we had the power of God, we'd create a universal circus of obnoxious grandstanding as we fought for fame.

God, the All-Powerful One, never flaunts His authority for personal gain, breathing life instead into the small flame of faith. Unlike His creation, He delights in the humble and the vulnerable. Through the cacophony of much-speaking, He alone hears the cry of the dawn-whisperer. 

The cosmos sprung to life at His Word. He populated a planet with two people fashioned from dirt and rebuilt Earth with a shipbuilder. He drew a man from the dirty water of the Nile and made him a deliverer. He created soldiers from slaves and conquered whole kingdoms with simple acts of obedience.

He flattened tower walls with a shout of praise and sent fire from heaven at the sound of a prayer.

He called a shepherd boy from the hills and set him over an entire nation. He immortalized David’s simple songs of anguish and praise to bring comfort to millions of hurting people for generations after him. He set a man upon the throne because he only asked for wisdom. He sent a Jewish captive to save her people from the plot of a powerful and deadly enemy.

At the appointed time for the King to set foot in His kingdom, it was not the grand halls of earth that received His Majesty, but a cave. He didn’t arrive to the roar of adoring crowds, but to the wondering whispers of shepherds. He didn’t make His entrance in a blaze of earthly glory, but in the light of a shimmering star and the song of angels.

The first Voice the earth heard from its King was not the triumphant shout of victory, but the wail of a baby. The first to behold His face were His parents and miscellaneous stable animals. He arrived surrounded by little warmth, light, or comfort. 

He brought all three with Him to offer a desperate world.

Out of prison cells across the centuries and from the cracked lips of suffering, God's glory emerges.

Beaten, persecuted, despised, and weak, God’s people are the lowly canvas upon which He paints His masterpiece of love. The light and dark colors of each life committed to Him produce a work of breathtaking beauty and scope.

God rejoices in small beginnings because it gives Him a chance to work; a chance to be our strength; the space to reveal Himself as our Deliverer. It offers Him the opportunity to fill the vacuum left by our nothingness. Since He can’t fill us with His glory when we’re already full of ourselves, smallness keeps us empty and available.

Thank God for small beginnings. May we always be small in our own eyes.

Awakening

How accurate is today's medical criteria for deciding who lives and who dies? 

A man’s pregnant wife fell into a coma after losing a baby to a blood infection. She was unresponsive and on a ventilator for two weeks. When the hospital told the man they were going to pull the plug, he “snaps and tells his wife off,” according to news reports. Two hours later, she began breathing on her own. Eventually, she regained consciousness.

This story and others like it have made me think. I wish I could ask some questions of the couple and the hospital:

• Could the woman hear her husband “telling her off” while she was in a coma?
• Did the doctor have any explanation for her awakening?
• Has anyone explored the possibility that brain activity becomes so quiet during trauma that it becomes unmeasurable by medical standards, giving the false impression the person is, in effect, dead?
• Has the fact that some people have awakened after being declared dead made the hospital rethink its protocol for turning off the vent?
• As healthcare costs continue to skyrocket and improved medical technology prolongs lives that would have been lost in earlier times, has the medical field lost its collective patience and begun to replace compassion with convenience?
• Has the financial and emotional enticement to harvest organs for transplantation trampled the physician's promise to "do no harm" to the patient?1.

Err on the side of life

As a mother who has twice had to fight for the life of a beloved family member against the decision of a medical provider, I urge others to err on the side of life until we have the answers we need for these and other vital questions. 

Everyone deserves the chance for an awakening.

1.https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_oath.html

Photo courtesy Erik Thorson 2023

The Gift of Existence

It would have been easier to die.

Kevin Thorson lay paralyzed in the grass of a church lawn in Canada, unable to move or breathe. Moments earlier, he missed a rotation while practicing backflips with a friend. He fell on his head and broke his neck nearly at his skull. As the friend ran for help, he lay there alone, fading into blackness as he fell unconscious.

He told us later that it was at the moment he felt himself near death that the presence of God came to him. The sense of the next world was intensely powerful, forever making this side of the veil seem the impostor. It would have been quick, even merciful, to have slipped quietly away to join God.

God wasn't there to take Kevin to heaven, though.

Instead, He had a message for Kevin. A voice so real Kevin thought it was audible told him, “You’re going to be okay.”

He awakened not okay. He was in a desperate fight for his life. Emergency personnel worked feverishly to keep him alive until he could be put on life support. He endured a helicopter ride to a larger hospital in Calgary, a doctor’s push for euthanasia, surgeries, pneumonia, bronchoscopy, paralysis, loss of privacy, and much pain in the first weeks before he returned home.

Later he endured serious infections landing him in intensive care. He had more surgeries for kidney stones. He spent two years on the ventilator before weaning off it during his waking hours, a feat declared an impossibility by his doctors. 

He regained more than they expected, but not enough for a normal life.

The loss was profound. It came in layers as the reality of the depth of his disability struck home. Some days he grieved over the dreams he would never see realized. Other days he longed for just the feel of grass beneath his feet again.

As victories came, like breathing on his own and taking his first steps and running a computer, his soul began to revive. He began to truly appreciate being alive. Watching him struggle to live out his faith despite profound brokenness, I began to see how completely God had brought to pass what He promised Kevin: 

He would be okay.

Existence, in all its facets, is a gift.

It is the man who has been told he would never breathe on his own who appreciates the feeling of air in his lungs.

It is the man who has endured great pain who appreciates a day when his body is at peace.

It is the man who once lost all feeling who takes joy in the warmth of the sun on his arms, the softness of a kitten’s fur beneath his fingers, and his legs under him again as he takes his first shaky steps.

It is the man who has had everything taken away who treasures anything given back.

Only when faced with loss do we truly understand the value of life.

To exist is to be. We are made in mirror image of our Creator, who calls Himself the great “I AM.” We were made to experience. We were made to feel, to love, to laugh, to hurt.

Those who say, “I would never want to live like that” must give room to those who do want to live, even if it is “like that.” The disabled and the vulnerable and the aged and the pre-born have no duty to die because their existence is inconvenient for others.

Yes, it would have been easier for Kevin to die that awful day in 1997. But what richness of life we would have missed in knowing him! The world is a better place because he exists.

Easier is not the same as better.

If you have ever contemplated how much easier it would be to be dead, talk to Kevin. He will tell you the gift is worth the fight. Check out the website Kevin founded and manages today. He is the owner/administrator of CMADDICT.com, a premier source of free Christian music and more. He would be glad to talk to you.

Photo Courtesy Grace Thorson 2023