What I’ve Learned About GOD While Living in 576 Square Feet

PLEASE PIN THIS IMAGE - What I've learned about God through living in an almost tiny home

 I stared at the furniture arrangement on the graph paper in front of me. Tapped my pencil. Did we really need that bookcase?

I erased it. Decided coffee tables were for covers of home magazines and rubbed that out of the picture, too.

I redid the furniture arrangement. Figured out the square footage needed to accommodate it, plus two small sleeping areas, a bathroom, and a basic kitchen.

“Come here!” I called to my husband. “I’ve figured out how we can live in 600 square feet!”

That day, I’d been sitting at the much-too-large-for-the-three-of-us dining table in our much-too-large-for-the-three-of-us 2100 square-foot suburban house. I’d been binging on tiny house videos on YouTube, increasingly more intrigued by the ingenious hacks even couples with a few children were coming up with in order to thrive in homes under 500 square feet.

Fast forward about thirteen years, and my husband, son and I have been living in 576 square feet for almost ten of those years. A year and two thirds before that, we lived in a sixteen-by-twelve foot Tuff Shed with a large loft.

One hundred ninety-two square feet on the main floor.

The reasons for downsizing to that extreme were both practical and spiritual.

• I don’t like housecleaning.
• J and I both despise the cost of maintaining a large house.
• We weren’t sure how far our nest egg would take us if we continued to live in a large place after J’s super-early retirement.
• We both wanted to reduce our utility bills. For J, it was for peace of mind. For me, it was about wanting to be the best steward over the environment as possible.

Which was possibly the biggest factor for me in wanting to build as small a home as we could get away with.

When it came down to it, I strongly felt that God was calling us to move to raw land, build a small house, and live more simply.

Buyer’s remorse.

When we first moved into the shed, which J had finished out with flooring and insulation, it felt like a dream come true. Every day felt like an adventure.

Of course it did. I finally didn’t have to care for our son by myself (he was a handful; I wouldn’t realize he was neurodivergent for another two years), J didn’t have to go out to a job he’d quit enjoying, and our son had five acres to run around on.

But the honeymoon phase didn’t last, as is typical for honeymoon phases. In fact, it didn’t even last an entire year. By that fall, the reality of the hard work required to manage a large garden, the higher humidity compared to the city we left a mere two and a half hour drive to the southwest, and the stress of not having a plumbed house (a different blog post altogether) was weighing down on all of us.

I began questioning whether God had actually called us to this lifestyle. I blamed God for my broken arm in October of our first year there (“If You hadn’t led us here, this would never have happened!”). None of us had any privacy. I was beginning to think I’d rather go back to having 2100 square feet of floors to clean than to continue living in a space where you could barely turn around without bumping into something.

Or someone.

Of course, moving into our newly-built 576-square-foot earth-sheltered house about a year later was an upgrade. I felt like I could finally breathe.

And turn around safely. 

But because it’s made out of concrete, we have to constantly run a ceiling fan and machines to keep the humidity down, which means we have to keep the rooms as open as possible.

The bathroom is the only room with a ceiling and doors.

And we are all three introverted autistics.

The honeymoon phase lasted longer with this house, but for years I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the space. Numerous times I’ve questioned whether J and I missed God about this simple living thing. I’ve salivated over videos of single women my age living in normal-sized homes. Dreamed of running away and living in a cabin by myself.

I still wonder today whether, had I known how turning fifty would sap the energy out of me, increase my sensitivity to noise and people, if I would have pushed for such a small house.

However…

He’s working things for good.

During the past couple of years, the Lord has been showing me why He brought us here, why He laid on our hearts to live in an almost-tiny home. It’s revealed things about Him, and things about myself.

Thing #1: God wants me to be selfless.

I freely admit that I have struggled with selfishness my entire life. I know I’m alone in that problem, so please try not to be shocked. Just pray for me.

Back to being sort of serious: there’s nothing like having to share 576 square feet with two other people to strip away your selfishness.

You have to compromise on just about everything. Furniture arrangement, bedtime, waking up time, what activities are done where, when to have a conversation and how loud you can have it.

I haven’t arrived, but during the past year or so I’ve been doing a lot of letting go of my own wants and learning that I can live perfectly well without them (say, for example, wanting to sing while I do the laundry). I am, after all, a product of my environment, having been taught (including by Christians!) that my happiness is the most important thing, and that I have a right to do everything that brings me that happiness.

Ladies and gentleman, show me where that philosophy is in the Bible, and I’ll show you one bridge in Brooklyn and another one in San Francisco that are for sale.

The fact is, we all have taken on an entitled attitude to some extent or another, twisting selfish desires into “needs.”

We need our space.

We need to express ourselves.

We need complete freedom in our lives to follow our whims.

I’ve learned that God calls His people to live just the opposite of those modern Western ideals.

Thing #2: God is a servant, and I am called to be like Him.

A corollary to #1 is servanthood. Yeshua displayed His will for His disciples the evening that He got down on His knees with a cloth and basin and washed their feet.

Face it: most Christians only give lip service to, well, service. We think that if we watch babies in the church nursery once a month, we’ve served. Or if we feed and clothe our own children, we’ve served.

But when you live in a small space with other people, you learn the true meaning of submissiveness and servanthood. You have to be willing to give up some of your time and some of your ideas on the perfect life in order to help the others.

If you don’t cooperate – a kind of service in and of itself – or offer a helping hand when needed, life gets tense and unpleasant.

But when you do, you become a lot more aware of what Yeshua meant about laying down your life for the people you love.

Thing #3: God loves me anyway.

Living in a small space amplifies not only your own flaws and imperfections, but those of the other people you’re living with. There’s no place to hide.

You can either get frustrated and resentful over it, or look at God’s character and go the other way.

God tolerates my imperfections. Really, He embraces them. He is, after all, the One in charge of my existence. And since He accepts my imperfections, I need to accept the imperfections of those around me.

Especially those living with me.

Thing #4: God is worthy of my honor and respect; therefore, so is everyone around me.

Though a servant, God nevertheless is worthy to receive honor and glory. Much more than any other being that has ever existed, God deserves our respect.

Created in His image, we deserve each other’s respect.

Which means, my husband and my son deserve my respect. In a house this small, that often translates as maintaining appropriate boundaries.

Full transparency: I’m still a work in progress on this front. When I have something to say, I want to say it now, and I often do – even when J is concentrating on something that’s more important to him than what I “need” to blab about.

Still, I let our son have his space (he needs a lot of it) and trust that he’s keeping his room clean enough for his liking. When I’m in a mood, J keeps his emotional distance because I can’t put any physical distance between us. 

Yeshua demonstrated boundaries in order to care for Himself and get His work done. Living in a small space, I am learning the importance of that aspect of relationships much better than I could in a large house.

Speaking of space…

Thing #5: God loves small spaces.

No, that’s not in the Bible. I’m not inventing a new doctrine.

But there’s something about a constrained environment that brings people closer to God. Part of it has to do with the coziness with other people. To rein in your fleshly, selfish impulses, to garner the strength to be kind and patient, you have to continually lean on the power of the Holy Spirit. Continually access the fruits that are within you by His presence.

Part is that when you live in a smaller space, there is less to do. Which means more time to remind yourself to live in the moment, which brings you closer to God.

In our house, the quiet is a big key. We all wear headphones when we’re listening to or watching something in our separate places. Except for the noise of the A/C window unit or dehumidifier, and the ambient noise of nature from outside when those machines aren’t running - and as J and our son don’t have a propensity to talk - I can hear myself think and a pin drop at the same time, for a lot of the time.

That also means that I can hear the wordless voice of the Lord within a lot more clearly.

Can you have quiet in a big house? Audible quiet, yes. But in a large house, there is a continual muttering from the floors in the many rooms, along with the furniture, reminding you of the dust and dust mites and clutter that need to be cleaned up and tidied.

At least for women, there is.

So. There’s quiet, and there’s quiet.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m stretching things. Or maybe I’m the only person in the world who had to downsize in order to deepen my relationship with God.

But I don’t think so.

Thing #6: God dwells in simplicity.

More transparency: with the three of us being neurodivergent, and only recently realizing that fact, we’ve experienced a lot of complications in transitioning from the city life to a rural life.

Autistic people don’t exactly thrive on change and adventure.

That said, once we settled and realized that God had not called us here in order to be self-sufficient in food (long story), our souls became as quiet as our house without the dehumidifier on.

Yes, we have chores. Yes, we sometimes argue. Yes, we encounter stressful situations.

But when you’re living in a small home, your life automatically becomes simpler.

• There is less to clean.
• There is less to maintain.
• There is less to repair.
• There is less room for “stuff," therefore less to worry about. And to clean. And to maintain. And to repair.

All of that “less” leads to more.

• More time to talk to your loved ones and friends.
• More time to play.
• More time to think.
• More time to pray.
• More time to relax and just be.

Which is where God is – in your being, not your doing.

And chances are high, you spend much more of your waking hours doing, rather than simply being. That makes encountering God much more difficult.

Because He dwells in simplicity.

Thing #7: God takes care of His children.

Being highly sensitive, none of us did well with the various stresses of city living. The weekend-long noises of lawn mowers, weed trimmers, and leaf blowers never failed to shoot my anxiety levels into the atmosphere. Driving in traffic wasn’t much better.

My husband and son only recently confessed their loathing of crowds of any size. I had believed that they, like me, just didn’t care for the social scene. But for them, the issue is much more deleterious and insidious.

At one point when we lived in the 'burbs, we had neighbors who engaged in several loud, midnight domestic disputes before the wife finally took their son and left. The mere possibility of having people that close who could get violent caused a low level of stress you can’t be aware of until you leave the city.

At least if you’re highly sensitive.

I could give more examples, but suffice to say that city living was much more stressful for us than rural living has been.

The same for living in a very small house compared to living in a large one.

God brought us here because He loves us. He knew we would do a lot better in this environment.

God takes care of His children, even if it doesn’t always seem that way.

That may be the most important lesson I’ve learned about God while living in 576 square feet. 

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