There’s that commercial that begins with a montage of people, in corporate meetings, on the news, on stage, on talk shows: “big, big, big, big” when one guy says, “small.”
I feel like that one guy.
We like things big: bigger houses, bigger ideas, bigger audience, congregation, or reach. The smallest coffee we can buy is “tall.” We shop at Costco to buy big quantities and swear to big resolutions for big weight-loss. We want the biggest opportunity, biggest impact, biggest legacy.
God works in the big: mass exodus from Egypt, the 3000 added to the 150 believers at the fireworks-like Pentecost, Billy Graham’s evangelistic meetings.
But sometimes God works in the small: Abraham and his only son, Jesus and his training of the small group of twelve, the church where my parents have faithfully served for over fifteen years.
I dreamed of the big, of performing with a big, top-tiered symphony; of impacting Italy developing worship in church-plants; of writing a best-selling novel. These days, God works in and through me in the small, in a dinner with friends, in days spent with my little boy, in a small group Bible study on Acts. I write short stories because that fits my lifestyle these days. Which means that when a short story is accepted to a literary journal, it reaches a small audience. Which means that I craft story and tap my fingers over word choice and write and rewrite and rewrite for few readers. This is how God works.
I’ve been thinking about smallness in another sense: not just in word count or audience but also in the nature of the story itself. What does it mean to write small stories about small people in small neighborhoods? What does it mean that I leave behind the big story of the big events and big suspenses and big ideas to find the small, the unknown, the intimate?
At the Festival of Faith and Writing, Larry Woiwode talked about his early days as a writer. He had been reading Samuel Beckett and the like and felt the need to write METANARRATIVE about the FRAGMENTATION OF TIME. One day, he wrote a sketch about his grandmother. This was the first piece he had published (by The New Yorker, no less). He learned to be comfortable writing about North Dakota, writing sketches of his grandmother.
So while I have a freedom to experiment, to take risks and do crazy things and fail, I do so not for the sake of experimentation but in order to work out the short story (or someday perhaps novel) that comes from the smallness of my life and neighborhood, to work out the globalness in my own little corner in my own little chair, the humanity in the people I see in my walk and history rather than in the headlines or in history books, the everyday tragedies and mundane beauties of suburban people not spotlighted on American Idol.
Big, big, big, big.
Small.
