Having Little is where we discover everything

​I live in a little one bedroom apartment. It's quite the downsize from the house I lived in a year or so ago. Someone asked me recently, "how long do you think you'll need to stay in an apartment?"

What they were really asking was, when do you think you'll be able to have a house again?

I don't know the answer to that, really. Mainly, because I've never thought about it. I've never once thought I need to start making a plan to get myself back into a house.

I miss two things about the house I lived in. Their names are Elliott and Ian. When I dropped Elliott off after eating dinner with him last night - and watched him walk into the house I once lived in - I felt gratitude for the time I'd just spent with the kid, not a sense of loss over the house I watched him disappear into.

And - when those two boys spend the night with me, this one bedroom apartment feels like a 5,000 square foot mansion.

I own a lot of the responsibility for that. The more you have, the easier it is to get to dreaming and feeling pressured to have more. Pressure that takes your attention away from the things that mean the most. If you're not careful, you can find yourself chasing things that mean nothing at the expense of a growing gap between you and the things that mean the most.

Sometimes, having very little opens your eyes to the reality you already have everything you'll ever need.

I think back to Honduras. I think back to the children, and some of the most genuine smiles I'd ever encountered. Kids who wouldn't have for a minute traded my hug for my cell phone. Kids who had grown up with nothing but love - wanted nothing but more love.

(Kids who also wanted to eat and have medical care, which we as a world owe them - but even without those needs being met, they smiled smiles I don't often see in our kids here at home.)

I think about Christmas. I think about Black Friday and Cyber Monday and the invasion of 50% off sales. Christmas is calling us into the ultimate chase of more. Of bigger and better and faster and prettier.

And yet there's a baby in a manger. A baby calling us to know we already have it all. A baby who would ultimately trade a barn for a cross would not seem to be a baby telling us Christmas - or life - is about the chase.

He would seem to be a baby, in the humblest of beginnings, telling us that sometimes when you have very little, you're as close as you can get to having everything.