Significance Amidst Repair

This week I sent an email to some of my closest friends recounting the last year and sharing my future plans.  In 950 words I wrote what I thought would be significant for my friends to know about me and my goals.  Then, I spent the rest of the day waiting for their responses.  Honestly, I couldn’t remove my mind from my inbox.  It was all I could do to not check my email every five minutes in the hopes of receiving a response from my friends or comments about my writing performance.  Why couldn’t I focus on other tasks needing my attention?  Why was I so anxious for my friends to respond to those 950 words?  And not to mention, why hadn’t more people been falling over themselves to read my blog as fast as I launched it?

Searching for significance is believing you can find an ocean in the desert.  It leaves you exhausted, thirsty, and constantly feeling like a failure.  Or maybe I can borrow a phrase from the preacher in Ecclesiastes and say the search for significance is a vain attempt at catching the wind.

It’s not wrong to want to matter.  It’s not wrong to desire people to see your dignity and worth.  To some extent we were created for such things.  In the creation narrative of Genesis God declares man to have a higher degree of “good” than anything else he created.  This “very good” is tied to the reality of man being made in God’s image.  It would be wrong for us not to see that as significant.  But our biggest error in our search for significance is thinking it is something we can work for.  Significance is not something you earn, it is something others give.  We matter and have worth not because of a public platform we create, records we set, or any other work we craft.  At a deeper level searching for significance is attempting to buy from others what God has freely given.

We are significant because God says we are.  God SPOKE creation into existence.  And then right after man rebelled and rejected him God SPOKE again of man’s significance to him by speaking the first words of redemption: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”  With those words the long and slow repair began.  Ultimately, in the Gospel we see our significance to God because he chose to enter human history and die for our sake and his glory.  We matter.  We have significance.  Not because we earned it from others or God, but because it was given to us by God and because others (whether they know it or not) see enough of his glorious reflection in us to want to see more.  We are significant because God finds us significant.  We are loved because God loves us.  We are accepted because God made a way to accept us.  Any acceptance, love, and significance we get from others is a beautiful gift from the overflow of grace.