How to eat and elephant (2): Pray for a miracle

I recently talked to a friend about his experience moving to live among the urban poor. And he said, "When I got here, the [veteran minister] said, 'It's two steps forward, three steps back, and you pray for a miracle.' and I thought that was a bit cynical. But the longer I'm here, more more I see that it is two steps forward, three steps back and you pray for a miracle. But you know what? Miracles happen."

When Moses was born, Pharaoh had ordered all the young Hebrew babies to be killed. Well, his mother didn't obey that order. Instead she hid him for three months. And then she put him in a basket on a river. A pastor once commented that we needed to heed Moses' mother's example and ask God to show us what was our part and when it was time to leave things to God.

So a few weeks ago, I wrote about how to eat an elephant and said, "One bite at a time." As I've been thinking about that, I think that's only half the answer. All we are able to do is one bite at a time. So that's what we offer to the process. But to be honest, we can't finish the elephant before it rots or we explode. So we need a miracle. Thankfully, God is in the business of miracles.

What's it like to live "one bite at a time, expecting miracles"? Well, I can't speak from a lot of personal experience, but this seems to be a freeing way to live--doing what we are able, in a measured way, then leaving the rest to the miracle-working God.

We've had a couple things come up in our lives recently that have thrown me on the hamster wheel of anxiety. There are many questions about future outcomes, most of which we have no direct control over, no matter how much we wish differently. There are a few things we can do faithfully, our one-bite-at-a-times, but the rest is up to God and well out of our hands.

I wonder if needing to remember that God works miracles is why the Old Testament stories repeatedly include reminders of God's miraculous deliverance of the Isrealites from Egypt. Maybe I'm not the only one that forgets that impossible miracles are not impossible for God. The ten plagues? The parting of the Red Sea? Manna from heaven? Water from a rock? Hugely impossible things for the Isrealites, they could never conjure those happenings, but God could and did, out of his power, out of his love.

So how do you eat an elephant? One bite at the time and pray for a miracle.

How to eat an elephant

Back in college, I studied Russian. Actually, I should say I studied Russian grammar or even Russian linguistics. And then, I went to Russia. And surprise, surprise, I couldn't speak Russian. I felt ashamed that I knew so much and could use so little. But I wanted to learn how to speak Russian.

So I decided that each day I would apply one new grammar rule. I gave myself permission to ignore every other grammar rule except the rule I picked out for the day. With time and a lot of trial and error, and the patience of the kids I was working with, my Russian improved.

This reminds me of one of my husband's jokes: "How do you eat an elephant?...One bite at a time." The elephant was speaking Russian, the bites were one grammar rule at a time.

When I think about the Christian life, I feel we get a lot of "Once, I ate an elephant" and a lot less, "One bite at a time."

We imagine what a holy life looks like and we think, "if only I prayed more and did that Beth Moore Bible study and got an accountability partner and served in the children's ministry and volunteered for the upcoming service project with my husband and kids and...who am I kidding? This is never going to happen"

When it comes to life with Jesus, I think that the big picture, the whole elephant is important. Becoming holy is what God asks of us. But we need to live in the one bite at a time. We don't like bites because they are mundane and even doable, but I think that's where trusting Jesus flowers.

So in one relationship that went off the rails, the elephant was a healthy relationship, the first bite was not being in bed together. Not sitting, standing, and definitely not lying down. Other bites later on would include an evening cutoff time for phone calls and a complete break from communicating for a while.

That was the last of a my string of inappropriate relationships with other women. So on this side of things, the elephant is not only a healthy relationship with that woman, but healthy relationships with other women in general and with my husband. But if you only see where I am now, you don't know how small that first bite was and how it was a miracle empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Maybe you've always been impressed by people who memorize scripture. Well, once, a roommate and I decided to memorize the book of Philippians. That sounds like a huge elephant. The first bite was Philippians 1:1. That's it. We added one verse a day, six days a week. It really helped to do this with a friend to smooth over the times when I just wanted to throw in the towel. Anyways, lo and behold, about four months later we were done.

But to the more mundane, I'm not a star housekeeper. It's easy for me to feel like if I can't get it all right, it's not worth doing any of it. So I'm learning to live in God's grace and accept cleaning by bites. One year, the big accomplishment was mopping once a week. Later, I added cleaning the bathrooms. And more recently, I put all the bedsheets on a schedule instead of whenever I remembered them. (I know all you neatniks are freaking out, but Jesus loves me even in my grossness.)

I'm a big picture person, so it feels strange for me to be the one to say this, but I think we need to think about individual bites more often.

If you're a wife, what if the next time you see your husband, you just smile and choose not to air the complaints of the day? Add a kiss for flair.

Or what if the next time you're lonely, you stay off the internet, just this once, and you pick something healthy or even neutral to do? Rearrange a closet, go for a walk, pick up a project you never finished, get gas for your car, change the batteries in your smoke detector. I don't know. Anything. Even a 5 minute thing.

I've been at war with depression lately as my medication has been changed. My bites are

1. not skipping exercise 
2. adding two cups of milk a day--it's a long story 
3. reciting John 6:68-69 over my dark thoughts. 

It's not magic. I haven't finished this elephant, but the alternative is to lay down and die. And I'm not ready for that.

So how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

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Watercolor by Fritz Ahlefeldt, hikingartist.com