Hacking the Good Life: Small Is Beautiful - Light Dancing on the River

The good life is all around us. That’s easy enough to see, especially in small things: small is beautiful! Everywhere there’s the beauty of nature, the laughter of children at play, the wonders of technology and opportunities for discovery and adventure stretching out in every direction.

What is harder to see is how to enter the good life, especially when you’re overwhelmed with it all or running hard just to keep up. Then it is that the good life seems surrounded by an invisible shield. We need effective tools to hack our way into it!

The best tool of all, of course, is learning how to yield to the Lord and listen to Him because He can guide anyone into adventures and discoveries. Yet, even if you don’t know Him, He can still get you moving in the right direction through His own secret ways of working. That’s what He did for me back when Jesus was just a strange name on other people’s lips.

The Golden Days of “Small Is Beautiful”

Years ago, when I was starting out as a hippie carpenter, I had an old Willis Jeep that I painted with the insignia, “The Lone Woodsman: Have Hammer will Travel.” My motto in those days was “small is beautiful.” What? Me worry? All I ever needed to do was one teensy, little job at a time and it was enough to keep a roof over our heads. Fortunately for me, my beautiful wife June wasn’t into the material life (in those days). We were living the dream.

Have you noticed by now that life doesn’t stay where you put it? Son Stefan showed up in no time. He was planned for, but we weren’t prepared for all the changes he brought with him. Daughter Alisha followed him a couple of years later. Necessity drove these two former hippies straight to Sears Roebuck where we bought a washer and dryer on credit. We entered the middle class never intending to depart from our hippie principles.

Still, we had to concede that straight society had a few things going for it which we needed. Soon, I was no longer working out of the backyard but out of small two-room shack on the highway into town. Not too long after that, I moved the operation renamed “Timberworks” into a 7000 square foot former eel factory. It was off to the races!

“Bigger Is Better” Takes Over!

What happened to my slogan small is beautiful? “Bigger is better” beat it to a pulp! This is the logic of the world that we live in. In those days, a book called “The Peter Principle” explained the inevitable operation of advancement by showing that people eventually rise to their highest level of incompetence. This is because if you’re just a little bit competent at something, you’ll keep being pushed into something bigger and better until you get to the place where you can no longer manage any of it well. That was me!

By now I had employees helping me—a motley crew of a half a dozen or so hippie carpenters like myself. Having to make payroll every week will really get you running hard. In no time at all there was no time left to stop and smell the roses. I was going 90 to nothing for about 80 hours of hard work each week. I had become the proverbial hamster on a treadmill, always thinking that if I only ran harder, I would finally get ahead.

A Return to Sanity

It took conversion to begin turning this Titanic mistake around (Go here if you want to meet the Master). Happily, within a year or two of meeting Jesus I was out of the rat race and into a much smaller workshop where it was just me once again, with a part-time helper and a 40-hour work week. I had no cares at all on the weekend and no work to bring home at night during the week. All this—with no loss of income whatsoever.

Talk about living the dream. It’s amazing, astounding, when I think about it. Bigger isn’t always better, but I had to find it out the hard way. Small really can be quite beautiful!

Speaking of small things, the discovery of a wonderful singer may seem small until you experience the impact upon your heart. See, “No One Ever Told Me about Eva!“