He remembers that we are dust.

I think it all boils down to these little minds of ours. How we can see the world with big eyes or ones that are appropriately small.

How we can either play God’s game or ours. Because in the end, the latter choice is the choice to lose. And it’s hard living in a world run by the losers. But even harder knowing what happens to them in the end.

This is the true crux of living.

God is a God of order, not chaos. From the very beginning, He takes the tahu vavoho–the wilderness and waste– and creates an organized creature that exists within the perfect perameters to thrive. The right amount of oxygen, the exact turn on an axis. An environment that keeps bodies walking, bodies that don’t survive on batteries or electricity, but God’s breath itself. He created the order. And we? We rise against it like a bird battering itself against the cage.

I was that bird once. How bruised I felt.

But then one day I marveled at the simplicity of living within my lane. I put aside the big, bright ideas I had because didn’t you know I’m the center of the universe? I tucked them under my bed and fell to my knees. I asked the God of my existence, the God of everything, the God of the pain searing through my mind and heart to reform me. To make me into something new.

And part of that journey has meant understanding what it means to be a woman on God’s great creation. It means remaining responsible to the ones who depend on me. It means working with my husband on all sorts of matters and trusting his good heart to guide our family. It means scraping off the sticky residue of bitterness and resentment that clings to a soul like gum to a shoe.

It means taking me out of my world and placing me firmly at the feet of my Savior, no longer the star but a hopeful participant.

A lot of the time, I think of God, when he made Adam then Eve. How here was the framework, the working material at His feet. He must have combed through the dampened dirt and sand and felt the nothingness in His hand but knowing the everything in His heart.

Here were the unformed shoulders He’d build the world upon. The beautiful things that would take life and motion but turn their faces away from Him.

But instead of running His finger over the canvas, an erasure right down our middles, He lets us carry on the play He’s written because He remembers that we are dust.