We need to see our proper place sometimes. Maybe you've heard about the psychiatrist who tells a client, “No, you don’t have an inferiority complex. You really are inferior.” Harsh words.
But we are less than God. We will never run the risk of eclipsing him. We won’t qualify as God impersonators—nor do we want to, when we think about it.
In the presence of God’s unfathomable greatness, it takes effort (or a huge ego) to avoid feeling small and incomplete. We inhabit a cosmos, I’m told, in which a dime held at arm’s length before the night sky would block fifteen million stars from view, if our eyes could see with that power. The sheer vastness of the universe does not let us long swagger in self-importance.
No wonder the psalm writer, scratching his head in wonderment, penned,
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them? (8:3-4)
When we confess our smallness to God, we are simply reaffirming what reality would tell us daily, if we had a proper view. There can be wonderful freedom in this admission. If you or I represent a speck under the unimaginably deep canopy of the starry heavens, if one life is a blip in the grand sweep of world history... the burden of having to “do it all” lifts. We never could do it all.
We see that we are not the only ones who matter, and the million things screaming for our attention, the mounds of tasks that make us feel indispensable, suddenly lose some of their power. As we gain a proper perspective on the larger scope of things, we relax a little. Confessing my smallness puts life—and my pride—in perspective.
Adapted from The Art of Prayer: A Simple Guide to Conversation with God