“Make me little…”

Text from photo journal pages in the upcoming book “The Wartime Letters.”

21 May 2021, Tbilisi

Audrey would have been here by now. With Besso. Probably already in Telavi or Lechuri (had I been able to continue on the mountain. In the mountains. In Tusheti. And I confess I am glad I did not remain). The world turns. Plans are illusions. Especially big plans. Especially when big plans appear to succeed—that is the biggest illusion. 

It is a grace when our plans crumble. It teaches us the end of things even before they begin. It prepares us to listen, readjust, fine tune our ears. 

It isn’t easy, all this readjusting. I don’t have a metaphor to define the nature of the thing. But I know it is a very special grace on my life that I have been prevented all the big successes I wanted and still long for. Had I received them I would not be sitting at this table here in Tbilisi this morning in May waiting on The Father to give me my true assignment. I would be somewhere “big” talking about “big things” to “big people” in “big” rooms with even bigger ambitions and bigger plans and I would believe their praise and I would no longer remember. 

I would not remember anything. I would not remember the dust and the long road. I would not remember the wind and how the wind sings—Pure. Violent. Sweet. Cleansing. Rejuvenating. Jarring. Course-shifting. Wave-generating wind. I would not remember the feel of a thin horse’s neck after a race across the Khaketi lowlands. I would not remember Sopo. I would only remember klieg lights and the crowd chanting my name.

Slowly I am developing an ear for things that matter. A man in a shepherd village—Lui in Lechuri, Georgia. Lui’s kindness (in my opinion) has prevented his so-called “success.” His generosity. He is far more interested in what he can help life plant in those around him rather than what he can harvest for his own benefit. Lui can do this because he is listening to something other than ambition. He is listening to his grandchildren—astounded by what they have yet to learn! About how their grandmother makes a meal, how a garden grows, how a young man or woman can teach themselves courage by crossing fields at night hunting coyote with their granddad. And because I can hear a little bit now I am able to stop and listen too. With Lui. Last night I heard the river. Then I heard the coyote. Then I think I heard the earth shifting in its sleep like a fit, heavy man in his old bed. I can listen with Lui. Right there in nowhere town in nowhere country with nowhere man… and a portal opens up on the invisible that was before time and always will be. Lui and me… small as atoms with all the atom’s potential to hold our world together or to split the world apart.

It is because big things are prevented me that I am now prepared to listen when I hear Lui laugh. I recognize his laugh is something public praise will never give you. We become too big to see the truth. We outgrow the room of our eyes. Our eyes close from fat.

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Dear Lord, I want to be little. I want to be nobody. I want to be just like you, Jesus. When you dared enter Your own creation. A little, fragile baby. Nurtured by a biology of Your own eternal imagination. Placed in time, You were never in a hurry. I want to be like you, Jesus, who befriended foul-mouthed fishermen, doctors and thieves. You did not want to be famous. You wanted to be little to listen. I ask that you never allow me to be big. Protect me from my worst ways and my basest possibilities. Let me be like You: Small enough to listen. Big enough to save us all.