Smallness

But [Stephen], full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”

I imagine the sun was scorching Israel the day Stephen was stoned. The dust lifting from the ground as stones fall, beads of sweat rolling down, Stephen’s vision of the glory of God rivaling the brilliance of the sun. 

Persecutors had thrown him outside of the city, pitching furious stones till he lay lifeless on the sand. What could make a man endure such pain unto death? Stephen was the first of millions of Christian martyrs. To what did the saints cling as the smell of their own burning flesh reached their nostrils at the stake? On what ballast did they depend when their families disowned them and left them desolate? How could Stephen and the millions of other martyrs so willingly lay down everything?

I imagine the same sun that beat down on Stephen now hovers over the Grand Canyon at dawn.

The vast ravine veiled in shadow, the swooping heights of the canyon walls are painted a thousand shades of crimson and orange and mauve as the sun makes its trek over the horizon. As the sky lightens, the depths of the expanse beneath me begin to be visible. The sky and landscape dance in the new light together. I want nothing more than to join their dance, but I can do nothing other than sit in the stillness of a holy moment. Sunlight washes over my face in a flood. I become a helpless child, a witness to something significant that I can’t understand. I can’t rightly explain the feeling of wonderful smallness that is stirred in me. “Grand” is hardly a just description.

I am swallowed. I sink, powerless to His grandeur– it pulls me under, He pulls me under. I’m drowning, but at last I can breathe. 

The Sun rises– it lights my eyes, warms my skin, illuminates what has been hidden, it is the thing for which the trees reach in their growth. And yet, this is but a glimmer of the eye, a hazy vision of something more real, a foretaste– an aftertaste? –of profound mystery. 

Creation provides us a vivid peek into the beautiful character of the Creator, but the wonder we feel at the edge of the Grand Canyon is nothing in comparison to the person of God himself. These wonders reflect the greatest Wonder, like the shadow cast behind an illuminated Figure hints at a Person standing in the light.

The martyrs understood they had been bestowed with a treasure infinitely more precious than anything this world had to offer. They had no need for possessions, securities, or the affections of other people. Their hands were empty, but they held something worth the sum of everything else. God Himself was and is that treasure. The very definition of goodness, mercy, love, justice, might, and righteousness– Creation shouts forth his glory. That sunrise over the Grand Canyon; the smattering of stars across the sky; ocean depths, stirring across the surface of the world in their tidal waves; the infinitesimal nucleotides responsible for billions of unique humans; the vibrations we experience at the Symphony No. 5– it all exists to declare His beauty. More than even this, it is the picture of Holy God condescended to a newborn child in an animal’s filthy feeding trough; it is the image of the God-man kneeling to wash the feet of twelve common men; it is the scene of Perfection hanging, gasping, dying on a cross as the atonement for my cosmic rebellion– this divine paradox that Stephen understood to the uttermost is that he had everything when he let everything go to the most beautiful: Christ.

A friend once told me a story: There were two men, each with something in their hands. One man clutched something dull and hollow, and the other man held something beautiful, precious, and lasting. Noticing the dullness of what his peer was holding, the other man ran to him and said, “Look, look at what I hold! Is it not beautiful?” 

But his peer asked him, “Why do you show me this? Don’t you see I already hold something in my hands?” 

“I saw that you did, and that’s why I came to you!” exclaimed the man. “The joy I experience in holding my precious object could not be contained, and I saw the hollowness of that which you hold. How could I not share my fullness of joy with you?”

Stephen and the martyrs held the most beautiful thing– this is why they were willing to count the world as nothing. Having found the treasure hidden in the field, they ran to sell everything and bought the field. This– He–  is what catches my breath at the edge of the morning Canyon, this is what the martyrs clung to in life and in death– Christ is mine and I am His.