“It takes great trust to believe in the smallest of beginnings.”- Ann Voskamp
“If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.”- Isaiah 58:10 (ESV)
Ann Voskamp concludes Chapter 5 of The Broken Way by noting that “first steps always seem like not enough.” Yet, first steps = the bravest steps. They initiate the journey to where you want to go.
Therefore, it takes great courage, in your brokenness, to step out of your comfort zone and give. As a result, Ms. Voskamp extends her thoughts on comfort. She states:
“Maybe — maybe there’s a Comforter who holds us gently in our brokenness . . . which is very different from a comfort zone that’s a death trap to break us. And the art of really living may just involve figuring out that difference. There is a time to be comforted . . . and a time to come and die into a greater kind of comfort.”
In addition, spending (pouring out) yourself enables you to pay attention to joy. And in the process, you multiply that joy!
Furthermore, joy multiplies as, through the Holy Spirit’s power, you hand over your whole self to Christ. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis wrote of the difficulty in doing this:
“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self– all your wishes and precautions — to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. . . to remain what we call ‘ourselves’ to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time to be ‘good’ . . . If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.”
Today’s question: Following your vocation loss, what “smallest of beginnings” have you attempted? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Cruciform self-giving”
