My life is smaller than I thought it would be.

I mean that literally. I have limited stamina. I am disabled. I spend more time at home than I ever imagined I would. Disability also means less money, which means fewer options. There are places I do not go, trips I do not take, and plans I have to think through in terms of what my body can handle and what we can afford.

That is not the life I pictured when I was younger. I was in college working toward a master’s degree in physical therapy. I thought I would work with kids, maybe through a children’s therapy center or early intervention. I thought I would work enough hours to build the kind of life I wanted for my family: a house, a pool, vacations every year, something much closer to the life I grew up with.

Then my health changed, and the life I had imagined changed with it. There was grief in that, and some of it is still there.

Being limited by my body is hard. Being poor because I am disabled is hard. Missing things because I am too sick, too tired, or in too much pain is hard. But I have learned that having hard things in my life does not make my whole life bad.

For a while, I made that harder on myself by looking at what everybody else was doing. People were working full time, buying houses, traveling, building careers, doing things I thought I would be doing too. Eventually I learned that comparing my life to everyone else’s was one of the fastest ways to make myself unhappy with what I had.

There will always be someone doing more, making more, or going farther than I am. I still want more for myself too. I would love better health, more money, a house of our own, more freedom to travel. But I have gotten much more deliberate about not turning somebody else’s good life into evidence that mine is lacking.

Besides, the size of my physical world is not the same thing as the size of my life.

Some of the people who make my world biggest are right here. My wife. My kids. My brother. My nieces and nephews. They pull me into their interests, their problems, their ideas, their lives. I do not have to travel very far to be connected to people who constantly give me something new to think about.

Writing lets me go farther still. I can sit in my own house and write about something I experienced, something I believe, or something I am still trying to understand, and someone I have never met can read it somewhere else. My body may stay home, but my words do not have to.

Books have always done the opposite for me. They bring the world in. I can sit on my couch and spend hours inside somebody else’s country, family, history, or imagination. I can read narrative nonfiction and learn how another person experienced a life nothing like mine, or disappear into fiction and walk around inside a world that does not exist at all.

Faith has widened my world too, although not always in comfortable ways. I am still working out what I believe now compared with what I was taught growing up. I have asked questions I once would have been afraid to ask and held onto beliefs that still feel deeply true to me. Even the questioning has made the world larger.

One of the things I still believe is that God reveals something of Himself through the natural world.

Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

I understand that verse best when I am looking up.

I see God’s hand in a sky lit up by the northern lights over Illinois, something I never expected to stand outside my own home and see. But I probably feel it most when I watch a storm roll in.

The wind changes first. The clouds darken. There is sometimes this strange pause before everything breaks loose.

Then the sky reminds you exactly how powerful the world is.

Storms can be destructive. I know that. I have seen what they can do. But there is beauty there too, even when it is a dangerous kind of beauty. Watching one move across the sky makes me feel very small in the best possible way. It reminds me that there is an enormous world beyond the little piece of it I physically occupy.

And then sometimes meaning has nothing to do with anything enormous.

Sometimes it is a summer evening in front of our house.

We are grilling in the front yard. I am sitting in a chair on the porch, enjoying the sunshine and the breeze while Channing and Royce play nearby. Royce climbs onto the scooter in front of Channing, and the two of them start rolling down the sidewalk.

He turns around, waves at me, and says, “Bye,” in that sweet little baby voice of his.

Inside, Rae is cutting cucumber for cucumber salad and cooking sticky rice on the stove. By the time everything is ready, it is almost dark. We bring the food inside and put it on the folding table we have opened in front of the couch.

Then we sit around it together and eat.

It is one of our favorite ways to eat our favorite Asian foods. Everyone sharing. Everyone reaching for what they want. Sticky rice, cucumber salad, whatever came off the grill.

It connects us to where my wife’s family came from, but it is also completely ours. It belongs to the family we built together.

There is something about eating that way that makes almost anything feel like comfort food.

Family feels like home to me. It feels like welcome. It feels like, you fit here. You have a place here.

Nothing about that evening would look particularly impressive from the outside. We are not on vacation. We are not eating in an expensive restaurant. We are not sitting around a beautiful dining room table in a house we own.

We are eating around a folding table in our living room.

And it feels full.

That matters to me because I once thought a bigger life meant doing more. Going farther. Earning more. Having more to show for all the years I had been alive.

Now I think I was confusing size with meaning.

My body still limits me. Money still limits me. There are things I wanted that I have not been able to do and things I may never do exactly the way I imagined. Those losses are real.

But a hard day does not make a bad life. A painful part of my story does not erase everything good around it. Struggle can take up real space without taking up all of it.

My world still has people I love, books that take me places, words that travel farther than I can, questions about faith I am still asking, storms moving across the sky, little boys riding scooters down the sidewalk, and sticky rice eaten together around a folding table.

My life has limits.

It also has meaning.