Turn the Mic Tuesday: Learning to Be Small

 

 

Hi friends! I am happy to share some wonderful words by Greer Oharah with you today. I think you will be inspired just as I have been.

 

There was a time I wanted to rebel against ordinary.

 

I had come from a whirlwind of a season that whisked me ten million miles high. It seemed like I was thriving in every area, queen of my realm, on top of the world. I got the accolades, the applause, even the boy. But as the wind settled, I could not. I rejected the feeling of normal, of routine, of ordinary. This couldn’t be all I was made to do? This couldn’t be the life I was supposed to live. What happened to the great wide somewhere, the thrilling adventures, the journey of success?

 

I tried to fight the smallness. I took on jobs, I volunteered, I ran long distances. But I was still small. No matter what I did. I wasn’t in the spotlight any longer. I wasn’t being recognized for achievements. I was just a housewife, a part-time babysitter, an accompanist for the school choir in a small mountain town.

 

But slowly, gradually, almost unseen, like winter melting into spring, I stopped fighting. I began to accept and even sometimes, welcome the smallness.

 

Because, as it turns out, smallness is where God so often shows up.

 

 

There was Jacob, scrawny beside his burly older brother, and God chose Him to be the father of His people.

 

There was Ruth – a foreign widow with no other line of work than to pick up the dropped pieces of grain. She became an integral member in the line of the Messiah.

 

There was David, the smallest of his family, a little shepherd boy. And God called him king.

 

And the mother of Jesus? The woman who gave birth to the Savior of the World? She was a teen-aged girl living in a small town.

 

So I’ve started to look for God in the small. In the trivial conversations I have with toddlers, in the scrambling of eggs, in teaching students how to read music, in going through spelling words with first-graders. It is like a treasure hunt, looking for sacred encounters with the living God in the midst of mundane dailiness.

 

We are put here on earth, John Piper preaches, to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.

 

I enjoyed God when I was on stage, when I received awards, when everyone knew my name.

 

I may enjoy him more now, when I have moments to quietly sit with a new-born as he takes his bottle, when I get to go on trail runs on rainy spring afternoons, when I stitch up costumes for a small town musical, when I wake up in the still-dark morning and scramble eggs.

Small isn’t so bad after all.

 

Greer Oharah is a lover of beautiful words, fast piano playing, and strong coffee. She is a firm believer in the sacredness of daily life and writes on finding God in the ordinary at ordinaryepiphanies.com. She lives in the heart of the Colorado Rocky Mountains with her school-teacher husband.

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