[A note from our Managing Editor: Tim Shorey, pastor and author, is one of our Gospel-Centered Discipleship staff writers. Tim is also currently battling stage 4 prostate cancer. On Facebook and CaringBridge, he’s writing about his journey. We’re including some of his posts in a series on our website called “The Potter’s Clay: Faith Reflections from a Cancer Oven.” To preserve the feel of a daily journal rather than a published work, we have chosen not to submit these reflections to a rigorous editing process.]

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Dear Journal,

As another day dawns, I feel like an inconsequential cancer, fatigue, and pain-afflicted little man. Reduced in health, strength, impact, and capacity, I sometimes wonder about the ongoing significance of my life. I feel small; too small to matter; too small to count; too small to contribute. For this reason, it helps to rehearse the effect that apple seeds have had on my faith, and to record that effect for posterity’s sake. I always need fresh faith-boosts, and I need to receive such boosts, even if they come from a source as small as a seed.

Consider the Seed

I consider apple seeds to be among the wonderful works of God. When I hold one between thumb and forefinger to ponder its greatness, I experience one of life’s awe-moments, one of those triggers that fill me with wonder and delight.

I am told that inside the average apple there are about five seeds. Each seed is about a third of an inch long and less than a quarter-inch wide. But how big is each one, really? What I have discerned is that each seed is almost infinitely bigger on the inside than on the outside. It is like Lewis’s stable that led into the true Narnia. From the outside it looked no bigger than a small shed. But those who crossed its threshold (with eyes to see and ears to hear) discovered that inside the shed it was big enough to lead into Aslan’s Country, into all of true Narnia, into that glorious land where all who chose could go “further up and further in” in a thrilling adventure of endless joy.

So how big is an apple seed on the inside?

Big enough to become a tree that will bear many apples. Big enough that in its “lifetime” it will produce thousands of apples, each with around five more seeds that can become five more trees that will produce enough seeds to fill orchards with hundreds of trees, each producing many thousands more apples, and countless more seeds. And so it goes.

One apple seed is big enough that over time, it can provide good nourishment and great taste for thousands of people. And, when its apple-bearing days are over, apple tree wood can be turned into fine furniture, or, if needed, become home-heating firewood. All this is inside a single seed.

The thought isn’t original with me, but I’m here to say that the trouble with us is that too often we fail to see into things. By measuring only the outside of things we miss the infinite wonder of what is going on within. We think that an apple seed is an inconsequential quarter-inch by third-inch throwaway, when in fact it is one of the many wonders of the known universe.

The truth of the matter is that everything that God makes, does, and permits, including my cancer and various trials, is bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Consider the body of the Christ Child. What was it? Six pounds, nine ounces, and twenty inches of soft and cuddly human flesh? And yet in that tiny form the fulness of deity lived (Col. 2:9).

Consider the tiny Manger. It held the infinite and uncontainable God who spoke the galaxies into being and inhabits eternity (Isa. 57:15).

Consider the single solitary Person hanging on a lonely cross on an obscure ancient hill. In that inch of space and blink of time, the sins of the world were borne away, reconciliation with God was accomplished, and the doorway into eternal life was opened for the innumerable host of all who would believe.

Consider the Garden Tomb. That small rough-hewn hole in the ground in which the beaten and shrunken body of Jesus lay, became a cosmic battleground on which the powers of life and death, good and evil, hell and heaven contended for final victory—and God won.

In all of God’s world, and in each of his ways, the inside is always bigger than the outside.

I don’t know what’s up with my cancer disease and treatment, or with my 36-year-long headache, or with my debilitating lumbar injuries. But I know that it is about something bigger than the ailing body of a single solitary man who spends most of everyday life in his 500 square-foot apartment, sitting in his recliner, wondering what’s going to happen next.

And I know that God made me to be an apple seed. He has designed me—and each of my circumstances—to be bigger on the inside than on the outside. And the same is true for you.

We need to see into things better than we do. We need to see into a cocoon, into a banana peel, into an acorn, into a sequoia seedling, into a mother’s womb, into what God is doing in the invisible realms of life, into a cancer cell, into a head wracked with pain, and into the frustrating losses and heartbreaking crosses of life.

We need to remember that “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”—because most often God’s prepared unimaginable deeds are hidden on the inside until they burst into sight (1 Cor. 2:9).

We need to consider that the “good” that “all things work together for” (for those who love God), is most often hidden in those very things, until God gives us eyes to see (Rom. 8:28). The good is on the inside of the sad and the bad of life.

Yet, we tend to see only the visible. We see only what we can see. Our eyes (and too often our hearts) are blinded by the outside of things. We need more of the wonder, the awe, and the faith that seeing the unseen can produce. And when we can’t see it with our eyes, we need to believe in it anyways. For what God is doing is always bigger than what he is revealing. Always.

* You can read all the posts in this series here.