Little Is Much

I live in a little one bedroom apartment. It's quite the downsize from the house I lived in a few years ago. Someone asked me several years ago after my divorce, how long do you think you'll have to stay in an apartment?

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

Well, here I am. Writing this morning from that same tiny apartment. I do so with no plans in the future for a house. I honestly don't ever find myself dreaming of a house.

There are only two things I miss about the house I lived in. Their names are Elliott and Ian. When I drop them off after our time together, and I watch them walk into the house I once lived in, I begin to miss them as soon as they disappear into that house.

But never do I find myself thinking, I miss that house.

And when my boys spend time with me in my tiny apartment, I experience things a couple of extra thousand square feet of house could never add an ounce of meaning to.

I have learned in life, the more you have, the easier it is to begin dreaming of having more. Dreams that take your attention away from the things that mean the most. And soon, if you're not careful, you can find yourself chasing things that mean nothing at the expense of losing 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 my time in Honduras. I think back to the children and some of the most genuine smiles I've 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, who upon his arrival signaled to the world, you now have it all. A baby who would ultimately trade a barn for a cross would not seem to be a baby telling us that 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.

The joy of Christmas, and life, isn't in the chase.

It's in a rundown barn. In a feeding trough.

It's in a tiny one bedroom apartment.

It's in giving up the chase and stopping to count. And hold. All that you already have.

And in that holding you will often discover, I have everything.

​(re-written from 2021)