Enlarge the tent

He was a shoemaker who taught himself languages over his last, a country preacher of no great standing, and he had become convinced of something the church around him had quietly stopped believing: that the command to make disciples of all nations still stood, and the unreached peoples were waiting to hear. When the young William Carey pressed this on a gathering of ministers in 1792, an elder, by the account handed down, told him to sit down: if God meant to convert the heathen, He would do it without the likes of Carey. It was complacency speaking in the accent of piety, smallness calling itself trust in providence. Carey would not sit down. He pressed the church to expect great things from God and to attempt great things for God, and where others heard the limits of prudence he heard a tent whose cords had been left too short: enlarge the place of your tent, Isaiah had said, lengthen the cords, strengthen the stakes. So he founded a society and sailed for India, into a labor that would consume his life. His refusal to sit down shattered a complacency that had let the church forget the nations, and out of that one break the modern missionary movement was born.

Sometimes the break is simply being unwilling to sit down. Everyone around you has quietly accepted a smallness, a settled boundary on what God might do, a polite limit dressed up as wisdom and prudence and providence, and the upheaval God asks of you is to refuse it. That refusal will feel presumptuous, because complacency always sounds reasonable and the person who questions it always sounds like they are overreaching. Carey's disconnect was from exactly this: a comfortable smallness that everyone called prudence, a boundary no one had thought to question in years. And here is the cost the image of the tent makes plain. Enlarging it always means breaking the comfortable line of the stakes right where they are. You cannot lengthen the cords without pulling up the pegs that felt so settled and driving them out into ground that frightens you. If God is stirring you to attempt something larger than the room around you thinks reasonable, the break may be a holy one, the refusal to keep sitting down when grace is calling you to stand.