Earlier today my sister shared with me a line that had resonated with her from a movie she had recently watched. “We are all just one small step away from making our lives work.” Ironically, she mentioned this quote in the midst of recounting a litany of missteps she had already made in her barely-started day. At the moment, it was hard for her to believe that any kind of adjustment would make her life work at the rate she was going.
We’ve all had these kinds of days; some of us even manage to rack up a string of them back to back. One little piece of vexation—a late start, a wrinkled piece of clothing, a broken nail, a forgotten backpack, a bad hair day, a lost key, an added errand, no milk in the fridge, an empty gas tank, a phone that is blowing up with texts and calls in the middle of an important conversation, picking up five pens with no ink and one pencil without lead, before grabbing a functional writing instrument to jot a quick note —is all it takes to start the snowball rolling, packing on layers of weight and gaining momentum, shortly to overtake you and knock you out of the game, until you are rescued or manage to unbury yourself.
What do we do when we catch a bad break, wake up to a bad day, or find our backs against a very unforgiving wall? What do we do when we feel stuck--in an unfavorable condition or circumstance, an untenable position or a dark, ominous mood? What do we do when for all intensive purposes we ARE stuck? When life is flowing unobstructed, plans are in place, headway is being made, and good days seem to far outnumber the bad, it is hard to identify with the “stuck-feeling” we experience at other times. Conversely, when we are stuck in the feeling-stuck condition, it is painfully difficult to imagine or remember times in which the predominant theme was other than defeat. Molehills look like mountains, and mountains stand one taller than the other.
On rough days or in tough seasons, one small step or one small adjustment hardly seems worth the effort for any difference we can imagine it making. Personally, there are days when the only adjustment I feel capable of making, before my feet even hit the floor in the morning, is to turn over on my other side and go back to sleep. Sometimes it helps, always it delays the inevitable—facing life feeling ill-equipped and unprepared for the tasks ahead of me. I question if there is anything that will make a difference in my state of mind or being.
It was a thought-provoking remark: “We are all just one small adjustment away from making our lives work.” I mused, was it true? I believe one message given here is that major breakthroughs can come with only a small change, sometimes purposefully made, others unintentionally. Therefore, perseverance and persistence are necessary to keep hope alive. As believers, we serve the God of the breakthrough, however, our hope is not limited to our effort and endurance. Regardless of whether we know what adjustment to make or how to make it, there is a decisive step we can take at any time that effects how our lives work; we can choose who to turn to and what to believe. We can believe in our working and weakness or God’s working and strength. We can give up and stop short, based on what we see and feel, or find God and go on, based on what He knows and desires.
Jeremiah 33: 2-3 declares, “Thus says the Lord who made it, the Lord who formed it to establish it, (the Lord is His name): ‘Call to me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things which you do not know.’ I read this and my heart coursed with hope. I can trade my smallness for His greatness, my nothing for His all. That is a miracle adjustment in the making every day.
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