But how many small things, or tiny things have changed your life?             

It was just a backyard 5-Day Club. Five summer days. In a living room. No more than ten hours total. A blip in a life time. But that 5-Day Club changed my life. A veteran of Sunday School, I knew the Christmas story. I even knew the Easter story. But I didn’t know those were, or could be, my stories.

That summer between my third and fourth grade years, I learned that the Christmas and Easter stories recorded events that mattered to me personally, that Jesus was born as a babe and died on a cross to pay my sin debt. I learned that I mattered that much to Jesus and the course of my life was changed. How do you pay a sin debt back?

It was just one week at summer church camp at Lake Lamoka Baptist Camp in New York. The speaker challenged us to think through whether we were really willing to do whatever God might ask of us. Now that’s a hard question if you really think about it. Anything? Do anything God might ask of me? Then she said that if we were not ready yet to say, “Yes, I’ll do anything God wants me to do,” we should pray every day for the next year that God would change our heart, that He would make us willing.

So I did. It was only one year anyway. But it changed my life, and that prayer and that willingness God planted in my heart would eventually take my husband and I and our family to Africa.

It was just one month, one month of living in a tiny house as though we were living there forever. Only one month. But I needed three bedrooms. I needed a spacious dining room and living room and family room. I neeeeded them for all the possibilities that could come with three married children and ten grands, four of them married. Could I really give that up? 

Hmm, could that be part of really being willing to do what God might ask of me?

It was only a month, but like that five days, like that one week, like that one year, that one month changed my life. That tiny house and God did it.

A while ago I wrote about downsizing, about moving five things a day, Monday through Friday, out of our house. Well, I started filling the box up, and once a week or every two weeks, we move the accumulation out of the house and on to a new home.

Remember that three bedroom thing? I learned from the tiny house, we didn’t need three bedrooms to live. Then God brought into our lives a family that had two children without beds. Do you think God was sending us a note, a kind of to-do guide?

When those bunk beds and all their linens went out the door, I wanted to dance. We were clearly on a journey, and I have no idea where it will end, but it sure is exciting when God does the driving.