When I was in kindergarten I thought I had to show all of my teeth when I smiled for a photo. It didn’t matter what clever technique my mother tried to use, I wasn’t going to grasp the concept of a natural smile. Needless to say, she didn’t have to worry about spending a ton of money on school pictures that year.

But as I got older, I actually became pretty good at smiling. Scratch that. I became great at smiling.

In fact, I became so great at smiling that I eventually decided it had to go hand-in-hand with my Christianity. I believed in God with every fiber of my being, and I knew He saved me. So how couldn’t I smile?

If I wanted others to know this God, they needed to see how happy He made me…right?

Then freshman year of college hit.

And my world fell in on me.

No woman dreams of marrying a man that struggles with lust, but the sad truth is a lot of us do. It’s a truth that many “church-grown” women neglect to understand or acknowledge until a serious relationship arises. Sometimes it even takes years into a marriage before it comes to the surface.

But for the large majority of us, we eventually have to confront the reality of our husband’s very real temptation to lust after another woman.

My little brother used to close one eye, hold his thumb and pointer finger about an inch apart from each other up to his open eye and “smush” me. I probably deserved it most of the time.

Isn’t distance perception a funny thing, though? That a nearly 5’9” person can seemingly fit between two tiny fingers?

Big things can seem really small sometimes.

When it comes to present issues in our lives though, doesn’t it seem to feel just the opposite?

Small things seem mammoth.

And most of the time we don’t even realize they are small until we are farther away from them. Then, we glance over our shoulder, hold our thumb and pointer finger an inch a part, and easily “smush” them.