Small Grace

Her laughter makes me laugh too, and I can hear her going through the house, flagrantly recording all time and space. Child and mother, we’ve exchanged places, and I try to return order to chaos and she too returns to Eden, naming each moment with a frame.

Eventually, she comes looking for me, her face filled with lens, her every step activating another click. I’m separating whites from darks in the laundry room.

“Can you show them back to me now?” She holds the camera out to me, as long as the neck strap will allow. Nothing can restrain her giddiness.

Settling into a pile of laundry, our heads lean toward each other and touch. Her arm around my neck, we scroll through her photos on the glowing screen. A picture of me bent over her, showing her which button to press. I’m mountain over her lens. I can feel the laughter rising up in her, and she cups her hand over her mouth to catch the bubbling pleasure. She’s enchanted by her photos. I grin.

Frame of a table. A doorknob. A bookshelf skewed on a tilt.

Yet her photos surprise, every single one. Why? It takes me a moment to make sense of it.

It’s the vantage point.

At thirty-six inches, her angle is unfamiliar to me and utterly captivating: the study ceiling arches like a dome, her bed a floating barge. The stairs plunge like a gorge.

She’s Alice in Wonderland, all the world grown Everestlike around and above her.

“Do you like them, Mama?” She pats my cheek with her laughter-drenched hand.

I can only murmur, flicking through her gallery. “Marvelous … just marvelous.”

She giggles and who can resist and I lay the camera aside and tickle her soft belly and she throws the head back, bliss, and I kiss blind all up that sweet neck of hers and she laughs breathless and we roll happy. And when she scampers off into other majestic realms, I look after her longing, longing to go too.

Could I?

I want that kind of crazy, happy joy, God. How to see the world again through those eyes? To live in the wide-eyed wonder of a world that unwraps itself grandiose and larger than life, so otherworldly?

As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.”^a

When I stand before immensity that heightens my smallness, I have never felt sadness. Only burgeoning wonder.

Dear Lord, make me decrease that You may increase and keep me small and humble. Cause me to embrace that simplest of truths — that all wonder and worship can only grow out of smallness.