Bishop Wills’ Life Journal Entry for April 6, 2008, “When I Feel Small”

S: I Corinthians 6:12-13 (The Message)
The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!

O: Paul is saying when I center my life on myself, my freedom diminishes and the life I live is constricted, anxious, fenced in. But when I set the Lord at the center of my life, I realize vast freedoms and spontaneities in an open and expansive existence.

A: This morning it is easy to feel my life small, constricted and fenced in. Believe it or not, even Bishops have days like this. What Paul tells me this morning is my smallness is self imposed by thinking about my own difficulties. Paul points me once again to the Lord God to be the center of my life. If I put God in the center of my life, then there is a vast freedom possible and my life can turn to being a servant rather than only consumed by my own feelings.

I yearn to live consistently with God at the center of my life. When I can live with God at the center of my life my feelings of smallness disappear. I think it is because my life becomes a servant to God who is so much bigger that my feelings of smallness get taken away of being part of serving to bring God’s Kingdom to this earth in the way I live my life.

P: Father thank you for this word today. I have been feeling helpless and small because of so many people suffering in and out of our churches. Give me the energy to live with you at the center of my life. Love, Dick

Y: I give God my feelings of smallness this morning.