My God is Bigger Than My Worries.

Yesterday I took Theo up to London on the train for a family get-together (Jesse had a birthday party, so we had a bit of solo time with each child, which was nice).

It's about forty minutes into the center of London, and he'd never been before. As we arrived I gave him the challenge of looking out for the "really big clock" (Big Ben, the clock tower attached to the Houses of Parliament). "It's huge," I told him.

So we began walking and eventually came up alongside the river and there it was, right across the water. Theo studied it for a moment and delivered his verdict: "It's not very big."

And from where he stood, he was right. From across the river it looked like something off a postcard, small enough to hold between two fingers.

So we kept walking. Over the bridge, until we were standing right underneath it. He tipped his head all the way back, and back a bit more, and then his eyes went wide and he went silent. "Oh. It IS big."

Nothing about the clock had changed in those ten minutes. The only thing that changed was how close we were standing.

Size works like that for all of us. Whatever we stand closest to looks biggest.

And most days, I don't just stand close to my worries. I stand directly underneath them, head tipped back, taking in every detail. I turn them over, check on them, carry them from room to room. From under there, they fill the whole sky.

But the view from underneath is not the truth about the thing. It's just the view from underneath.

The same worry that towers over me at two in the morning looks very different from across the river, the way Big Ben looked to Theo: real, still there, but small enough to hold between two fingers.

The psalmist knew where to look. "I will lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth."

Help doesn't come from staring harder at the thing looming over me. It comes from lifting my eyes, stepping back far enough to see that the One who made heaven and earth is bigger than anything casting a shadow today.

So that's what I'm telling myself today. Not to pretend the hard thing isn't real. It's real, and it's heavy.

But I don't have to live underneath it.

Step back. Look up. The problem won't have changed by tonight, but where I'm standing can, and from beside the God who made heaven and earth, the thing that filled my whole sky this morning will finally look its actual size.