Growing Room
For Life in Tight Places
by
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The Ugly Nautilus
My life is just one extraordinary story after another of God’s manifested grace. Of how this grace beckoned me, led me all the way. He has grown me, and he made space for me in places too tight to breathe. The Most High stretched me when I preferred to remain in my present chamber because it just seemed too hard to do anything else. It was too scary, too daunting—and the Tamera-old fear of failure and rejection slunk into the space. But I have a story to tell of his grace and dimensions of it—the breadth, height, length, width, and depth of it. I have asked his Holy Spirit to help me to tell this small part of the story. In this brief increment of space, I want to account for his profound grace in my life.
I needed growing room. We, frail humans need to know that God will turn any place into growing room. Growing room means we have space to make mistakes without judgment. We need room to meander without being accused of leaving the path or the way. We need to abide in the parameters of grace, God’s tensile and flexible grace. Only God’s grace can make and create room. We try. We offer. But only he can extend.
In the places of distress, when our breath catches our ribs and it hurts to take oxygen in deeply he will expand us. In spaces physical—when claustrophobia threatens to confine us he will provide a wide open space. In spaces emotional—when our skin seems far too tight, stretched paper thin from the routine of living, and the eking out of an existence he will create growing space for us. In spaces spiritual—when our souls seem too small, too hampered to hold his fullness he will make room for us so that we might hold more of him.
The Author and Finisher, the Creator, the Holy One, the Almighty One, the Just One, the Lord God Almighty, El Roi, El Shaddai, Adonai—will make room for us. And when he does he will also bend down to listen to us. How can I assure anyone of this? How can I be so confident he will bend down? Because his word says he does and will.
He bent down to me. Bent down to listen to me. To me. This ugly nautilus. This creature with no beauty to speak of except this extraordinary shell. As I wrote Growing Room I reached back—back into the inmost chambers and brought out what he taught me, revealing just how far he will go to create growing room for us. Often I had no idea what he was doing. All I could see was the ugly reflection of myself, and I could feel the walls of me getting smaller and smaller. Many times I faltered and stumbled when I realized just how ugly the nautilus was. What in the world was I doing taking this creature as a symbol? But I remembered (the Spirit reminded me). I didn’t take the nautilus. I took the shell. If I took the nautilus, then the story is about me.
The story is not about me.
It is about the God who can and will take something so ugly, like a hideous cephalopod, and use it to create something of extraordinary beauty. The nautilus’ shell is one of the most beautiful, perhaps even one of the most gorgeous, of all creations in the sea. But the shell is God’s doing. It is his art, his design, and his architecture. So am I, so are you.
Remember God starts long before we begin.
In Psalm 4:1, the psalmist makes demands of the Lord. “Answer me when I call to you, O my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress; be merciful to me and hear my prayers.”
Years ago I stumbled into this verse. When I chose the legend for the map of me, and the chambered nautilus emerged, I began to understand more about tight places. Psalm 4:1 and the nautilus shell were connected—fused together in my mind. The Spirit etched the words of David on the innermost parts of the shell’s iridescent lining. I returned to the verse over and over. I took it apart line by line, phrase by phrase, and word by word. I wanted to be bold and audacious enough to say to God, “Answer me when I call to you." But this psalmist, David, was desperate. He was at the last end of himself, and there was no other place to go. Wedged between too many rocks and hard places this king was in distress. Caught between the truth in his head and the panic in his gut he couldn't breathe.
Sound familiar?
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About the Book
Tamera Rehnborg learned about God’s grace the hard way. For years she lived in hard, barren places. Eventually her world spiraled down to a small chamber. She lost her voice, her identity, and her vision. In 2007, a life change forced her to call out to God to make room for her.
Growing Room is the chronicling of her move out of those tight places. Slowly and incrementally, God used commonplace life experiences to introduce her to his tenacious grace—a grace she had never known. He taught her to seek and to find him in the most obscure and ordinary of places. God revealed himself through the tight places of biblical personages such as Hagar, Gomer, Jacob, Peter, and Mary, but most often he engaged Tamera through her daily routine of living. Through these experiences, she learned to abide in the parameters of his grace.
Growing Room is the story of God’s unfolding revelation in every situation—holy to the profane, humorous to the serious, and the mundane to the extraordinary—for us to know him. Tamera wants others who are in tight places to know that the relentless love of God will make room for them to grow into his wholeness and perfection. His beautiful, fierce grace will provide the growing room we need to stretch out into his spacious place.
About the Author
When she’s not babysitting grandchildren, working at the county library, harvesting tomatoes, drinking water (but not pop), loving on her four grown daughters, reading from an always-growing stack of books, or making art out of words to talk about life, Tamera Rehnborg quietly lives with her husband, Steve, in Winchester, Kentucky.