Tiny

Sometimes, I feel so tiny that I could just blow away into nothingness.

Weakened by disease, sickened by some ailment or another, my body feels thin and brittle, like I could just disappear. Even in health, I might look up at the night sky and feel overwhelmed. Have you ever looked up at the trillions of stars in the billions of galaxies and felt insignificant by a sense of how minuscule you are?

And yet…

How small is God?

This question is rather ridiculous, as God cannot be measured. The very definition of “God” is the one being who is both eternal and infinite, mysteriously undefinable.

And yet…

Do you see these punctuation marks, these colons and periods in the sentences that I’m writing? God willed to become smaller than one of these.

The Word of God brought forth the stars, the Earth, and all living things into existence over eons of time that were but a flash to the Divine. And then, at one particular time, in one particular place, the Word of God was made flesh. The Creator became a creature, one of us tiny, lowly humans. The boundless, ceaseless Divine chose to live as one of us, limited by the created confines of time and space.

So how small was God? In the instant that the Word was made flesh, God lived within a body smaller than the point of a pin. That’s the profound Mystery of the Incarnation, when the Holy Spirit conceived life within the womb of the virgin, Mary.

Jesus’s life began as a zygote.

So did yours. So did mine. The entire genetic makeup and traits of a human being contained in 0.7 mm — a living, growing, striving to thrive creature, here on this tiny planet in the midst of an incredibly vast universe.

If Infinite and Eternal God was pleased to dwell within such an insignificant size and shape, without losing any of the fullness of His divinity, then perhaps we humans are not so insignificant after all.

Tender Love

He who is the Creator and Master of the universe chose to lovingly create one creature in His own divine image and likeness: human beings. And even when we chose to use the divine gift of free will to turn away from Him and His way, He bent low, in sublime humility, to tenderly reach into our lives and transform them. God entered intimately into our humanity by becoming one of us, even in the minuscule zygote stage.

Over the course of four Sundays before Christmas, we are called to meditate upon the very beginning of the life of Christ. He who is the Son of God, the Second Divine Person of the Holy Trinity, has His beginnings before the beginning — immeasurable and unknowable to us. But through our Advent meditations, preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, we can come to see and understand that there is real tenderness in God. There was indeed a precise day in the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens on which the Word was made flesh. And there was a very specific place: within His mother, Mary.

The seeming insignificance of the village of Nazareth and the young peasant woman who lived there were both specifically chosen by the Infinite One to be home and mother to Him. God chose to have a peculiarly intimate relationship with us human beings by living in humble union with us. The Son of God emptied Himself, stooping impossibly low to be exquisitely near us, amazingly tiny, breathtakingly dependent, so that He may be tenderly loved in the way that a truly loving mother intimately cares for her child. God desired to be helpless in her womb, helpless in her arms … even helpless in the cruel world of Man.

All this because Almighty God tenderly loves us. Tiny, dependent, and helpless as we are, God now shares, for all eternity, intimate union with us in the flesh. Sanctifying every stage and every aspect of our human lives, God lifts us up from our fallen state, from our feelings of insignificance and obscurity — even if microscopically small — and raises us up to Himself, through His tender mercy, to the glory of His unending love.

We will never disappear.

The Point

You and I are not mere specks. We are intimately loved and particularly chosen to be the precious children of God, now and forever. So precious are we that, in all the universe, He came to dwell here, with us. Jesus began His life in seeming insignificance to manifest the power of God’s tender love for you and to share intimately in the eternal importance of your life.

If we ever find ourselves wondering what’s the point of of our tiny lives, let’s remember the point where divinity came down to intersect and abide within humanity. This is God’s point of no return. He gave and gives Himself wholly and completely to all of humankind for all eternity — His tender and intimate love divinely bound forever to you and to me from conception.

In the vastness of the universe, there was one singular point. The point of a pin. There was the fullness of God pleased to dwell — a speck of a speck. This is Jesus. … And mercifully, this is you, this is me. Not insignificant, but holy. Made for eternity, for infinite love.

© 2022 Christina Chase

---

Feature Photo by Ivan Diaz on Unsplash