THINKING BIG IN SMALL PLACES

"But you, Bethlehem Ephratah, though you be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel..." (Micah 5:2)

One key to life-success is thinking big in little places. Most of us start in little places. Remember your first apartment? You were fashioned in the tight quarters of a womb. That allows little room to even squirm let alone set up house. A playpen only has about nine square feet of floor space. My first pastor's study wasn't much bigger than a phone booth. The human brain fits in a rather small cranial cavity as well, but creativity and imagination need not be confined to tight quarters. They talk of thinking outside the box. If anyone had to break loose from small town thinking it was Jesus. In Him, divinity was crammed into a single cell, "born of a woman, made under the law..." Jesus was born in a stable because "there was no room for him in the inn". Well I guess not. How could the innkeeper have accommodated Jesus had he issued Him a whole floor of luxury suites? Jesus is too big to fit in an inn or a womb or a manger or the little town of Bethlehem or even the whole world. Paul wrote that "God was manifest in the flesh", that is, all faith was compressed into a single personality.

How does that apply to us? Bethlehem was small but not so Bethlehem's Babe. No one has to comply to predetermined boundaries. Abraham Lincoln lived in a log cabin but changed address to the White House. Most greatness can be traced back to a personal Bethlehem Ephratah. I've driven by the boyhood homes of Hoover and Truman and others. Not so impressive. Well, actually, very impressive, for these men saw beyond social and economic limitation and marked their own horizons. It is a matter of desire. Jabez prayed, "Oh that you would bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that your hand might be with me..." (1 Chron 4:10) God joins the adventure for those willing to break away from the pack. "And God granted him that which he requested". Stay in the lifeboat if you please. Peter found there was a lot more room for walking out on the open sea, so he stepped out.

Concerning a prayer life Jesus told us to enter our closets and shut the door (Matthew 6:6). Don't miss the intention. He wasn't advocating a return to smallness. A prayer closet is a tight space but the transactions there are as big as oceans. Bowed in a fetal squat with face buried between folded hands makes what looks like a small man, but never are we bigger than when crumpled in a corner in desperate prayer. In the closet heaven opens into clear view. Little plans are discarded as we behold a great big God. It is a return to maternity. We came from the womb as babies with unlimited potential and a blank slate. We step out of the prayer closet with equal promise. "Though your beginning was small, yet your latter end should greatly increase" (Job 8:7). That is why we never have to curse our current circumstance. Like Jesus, you or I may be in "the least of the thousands of Judah", but out of such inferiority and limitation came the Ruler in Israel. So, don't despise the day of "small things" (Zechariah 4:10). Your current situation is only a uterine passage to a much bigger and brighter world. There will be some contractions, but all births feel the squeeze. The victory comes when we refuse to limit God or hamstring our own faith, thinking big in small places.

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