Feeling Small in the Best Way

^{In a time when Ai is generating oddly picture “perfect” scenes and our feeds are being filled with Ai generated writing thoughts and ideas for people aren’t you weary of it? Aren’t you sensing the loss of the heart of people’s rough, not-so-perfect writing? Don’t you long for something true and real and from someone’s heart and from their real life perspective? This is what I write – real life, real perspective, my own ideas and words – simple and not polished, but true from my heart to yours. My words and the photos I include are from my life and never Ai and I’m sad, and weary too, that we even have to say this – yet, here we are. Thank you for reading and sharing your real thoughts as well.}

If I let it, this world can make me feel bad for not being big.
So, this moment…feeling so quiet and small…was a much-needed reset.

Sat by the water for a while – sat right in the middle of it, actually, to get this immersed photo. I lowered my phone as close to the water as I dared and snapped a few pictures, hoping I wasn’t about to watch my phone disappear downstream. Looking at it now, I can remember exactly what it felt like to sit there.

Glen and hiked to this peaceful spot. I didn’t exactly come prepared for climbing around in a mountain stream. But I felt compelled to not just watch the water rushing by but to get into it. I had tennis shoes on, rolled my pants up past my knees, stepped across decomposing trees and slick mossy rocks hoping I wouldn’t completely wipe out into the water but I wanted to get out into the middle of it anyway. I made my way awkwardly across the unstable, mossy rocks, to a steady rock in the stream and just sat down on it. 

I didn’t really care that my back side was getting so wet although I did have a quick moment trying to recall what color underwear I was wearing and if they would show through, ha! *shrugs* but the spontaneity of getting into that water and delight and peace I felt sitting there made my self-consciousness about what I was wearing and if my underwear happened to be red that day evaporate. 

Water rushing past my legs, cold air coming up off the stream, the smell of pine trees and wet soil and sunshine warming the rocks around us. Glen standing on the bank taking it all in – the 360 around us – and neither of us really saying anything…but it also didn’t feel silent. 

That sounds strange when I type it out, but it’s true. The water moving over the rocks, birds everywhere, wind through the trees, branches creaking, water rushing past our feet… my ears were so full of sound that the quiet somehow felt even quieter.

(Now I sound like I’m writing a John Denver song. *sings Annie’s Song*)

But sitting there also made me think about how often water shows up in Scripture and even in the way we talk about life. When we’re overwhelmed, we say we’re drowning. We say we’re sinking. We say we’re getting pulled under or caught in a rip current. Water can feel frightening when it’s out of control and we can’t find our footing.

Scripture understands that tension. Water is everywhere in the Bible. The Spirit of God hovered over the waters at creation. Noah watched floodwaters cover the earth. Moses led Israel through the Red Sea. David wrote about being led beside still waters. Jesus calmed a storm with a word and later invited a sinking Peter to trust Him in the middle of the waves.

And yet here I was sitting right in the middle of it feeling rested by the sound and the movement, the coldness of it around me.

There’s no way a photo like this can capture it all. I mean, it can give you the sense of what it was like but there’s no way that my words can capture it either. I’m neither that good of a photographer nor that good of a writer. 

I left feeling rested, grateful, and just happy. All of the reworking and rethinking and talking over again of some regular life stresses and some big heavy super stressful stuff going on in our lives…that drive on the winding road up and then down and around to the spot we found …I don’t know, it feels a little silly and cliche to say it was like a therapy session, but it truly was. We just both sat there soaking it all in. Best couples therapy. Breathing out stress and overthinking and breathing in something unexplainable – the sense of it’s going to be okay. God’s got us. That sense was as real as the crisp mountain air around us, the loud quietness, and the refreshing water. 

Rivers, streams, deep waters, storms, rain, oceans. God uses all of it to teach me about Himself and about myself too. I came home realizing how much I needed the reset of sitting still long enough to feel small again in the very best way. Just reminded that God is God and I am deeply cared for by Him.

I wrote a Bible study through several Psalms about this idea of rethinking rest and stress – resetting my mind, reorienting things so that my perspective is seeing God over my stresses. 

I didn’t go out into the water with that in mind, but I realized it as I sat there. This is exactly what my time in the Word, writing the study, meditating on different Psalms brought me to. It’s just really humbling, and my heart is truly thankful for resetting moments like this. Feeling small in the best way is peaceful, quieting, and a resetting because it causes me to look to Him and His “bigness” all the more.

“As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for You, O God.” Psalm 42:1

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CURRENT BIBLE STUDY: “Chill: Rethinking Stress & Rest” – June-August, 2026 – Details/Register HERE