Feeling small.

So, I went to the beach two weeks ago. And it was great. A private beach over spring break with four of my best friends was exactly the break I needed from the chaotic life that is college. The night we got there, we went straight to the beach. It was dark outside, the sun had set an hour earlier. The weather was perfect, warm with a breeze.

I walked a few yard away from the group, listening and looking. The ocean felt just so...huge. Unbelievably huge. Unending. Unceasing. Unpredictable (as much as we try to change that). I thought about how I compared to that. All five feet and five inches of me. And I was struck by how little I was. How insignificant I am compared to the ocean, a force that determines so much. The ocean doesn't care if I'm alive or not. To the ocean, I am completely unimportant because I affect nothing. I can't inflict awestruck feelings in people just like I can't inflict tsunamis. It works on it's own timing and doesn't let anything stop it, much less an average-in-physicality twenty-year-old from Suburbia, Texas. The waves would continue to crash in the surf whether I stood on the edge of what seemed like eternity or not.

But you want to know something weird?

I was comforted by that.

I was glad that I didn't compare to the sheer power of the endless ocean. I was happy to feel so small and so unimportant. And it's not because I have a low self esteem or because I wanted to dig for compliments. This is the first time I've voiced what I was thinking that night. It's because I knew that no matter how tiny I felt or how vast the ocean is, I am close with a God who is bigger and better.

2 Corinthians 12:9 says "But He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." Standing before the ocean, I realized that I was entirely to weak and unimportant to do anything of worth. But I am a child of the Lord, chosen to be his own. I don't have to be strong or important because the Lord is always stronger and he will always be the most important. When I feel weak, He is stronger and it shines through when I'm at my lowest point.

That's what I'm meant to do. Show how the Lord is greater in all aspects of my life. And if that takes me being small and insignificant to the world, then fine. But I am loved and I am cherished and I have been chosen to live through Christ.

"I hear the Savior say/"Thy strength indeed is small"/child of weakness watch and pray/find in me thine all in all" --Jesus Paid it All