Why We Long for Something Bigger
Experiencing Transcendence Through Participation in Mission
In 2009, alpinists Fabrizio Zangrilli, Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, and Simone Leorin stood at the base camp of K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, and watched a friend fall to his death. They then helped load the man onto an emergency helicopter while consoling his climbing partner.
That climbing partner, remarkably, would return to K2 the following year and himself die on the mountain.
Perhaps even more bewildering, however, is that the trio not only continued their summit attempt, but returned to the foreboding mountain again and again in the years that followed.
Why?
Why do human beings pursue things that seem to stretch beyond our mortality? Why are we drawn toward tasks that seem impossibly large?
Somewhere deep within us is the desire to belong to something bigger than ourselves. It is so woven into our humanity that we often fail to notice it beneath the ordinary rhythms of life. Yes, a climber climbs because he loves to climb. But as Zangrilli observed, “The will to try something big, something dangerous, something extraordinary, it’s part of who we are.”1
The Source
Thanks to Scripture, we know these longings are not accidental. Genesis 1:27 tells us we were created “in the image of God.” Every person who has ever existed, therefore, is bound up with something big, dangerous, and extraordinary: God himself.
It makes sense, then, that God gave such a staggering calling to his image-bearers: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). It was a mandate so great that it’s almost absurd: one primitive couple in a Mesopotamian garden told to cover and rule five quadrillion square feet of wild earth.
The scope is divine.
Yet with the arrival of sin, humanity forgot the purpose and posture of this calling. They would need a command that reoriented them to the source of their longing: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:37–40).
With the arrival of Jesus Christ, however, humanity would finally see how this calling and command could be fulfilled. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus made it possible for his followers not merely to remember God’s mandate, but to participate in it. Thus, he issued a commission: to go in his authority and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18–20).
What would it look like for the world to be filled and subdued by people who love God with all their heart and love their neighbors as themselves?
It looks like ordinary men and women joining Jesus in his impossibly large work of making disciples in all of life, among all places, at all times.
The Greatest “Bigger”
In light of these truths, I’m convinced the greatest “bigger something”—that which we all long for—is found in Jesus and his beautiful, dangerous, extraordinary mission.
For a small percentage of Christians, this longing draws them across geographic boundaries into cross-cultural ministry. Like a mountaineer captivated by the summit, they step into unfamiliar places because they can’t not. As Simone Leorin once said of K2, “We come here because this is where we feel most truly alive.”2
But this participation was never something intended to be experienced only by an elite group of image-bearers. Arrival at its base camp actually requires no passport.
In God’s upside-down kingdom, it is not always the grandeur of the mission that leaves us with the deepest sense of fulfillment. Often, our longing to join in something great becomes inseparably tied to the painful realization of just how small we really are.
When I arrived in Africa as a young missionary, despite years of anticipation, I almost turned around and headed straight back home. Joining a small team serving among eight million of some of the most isolated people in the world sounded compelling in a college dorm room. But driving along mountain ranges and seeing glittering tin roofs scattered across incomprehensible landscapes, the magnitude of it all became overwhelming. The pulsing guitar riffs of Passion conferences no longer had the power to convince me I could go and change the world.
I was way too small.
I Surrender
Afterward, I remember muttering, half to myself and half to God, “If this depends on me, then I quit.” I couldn’t make it to all those huts. I couldn’t even speak the language. It was pure desperation. Like Bill Bryson’s description of being lost in a vast forest, I felt “small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child in a crowd of strange legs.”3
In hindsight, this surrender was more than missiological; it was deeply personal. I had placed myself at the edge of something far beyond my capacities and suddenly realized just how incapable I was for the task before me. I needed a God bigger than the mountain.
Wherever you land in Scripture, it is hard to miss that people are small and God is big. Yet it is often when we see ourselves as part of God’s mission that we truly begin to accept our smallness. Abiding in Christ’s commission—even on the other side of despair—helped me realize that although he invites us into his vast purposes, they do not finally depend on us. He speaks to us like Gandalf’s final words to Bilbo in The Hobbit:
“You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in the wide world after all!”
And we respond as Bilbo does, laughing:
“Thank goodness!”4
That, my friend, is a greater feat than any summiteer has ever known.
To be sure, the Christian who avails him or herself to God’s mission will find something bigger. Whether along an escarpment or in a hut, a classroom or a cubicle, a nursery or a nursing home, the wonder of joining Jesus in his work in all of life, among all places, and at all times speaks to some of the deepest longings of the human soul.
Not because you finally find your niche.
But because, here, you behold your God.5
K2: Siren of the Himalayas. Directed by Dave Ohlson, Indelible Media, 2012
Ibid.
Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (New York: Broadway Books, 1998)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (London: HarperCollins, 2012)
This essay is adapted from an article originally published by the International Mission Board.