Did we miss the chance to matter? Is there something we should have done to make life more exciting, more productive, more meaningful? Is it too late to change?
This is not a struggle unique to Christians. Nearly all the people I've met over the past thirty years-first when I worked as a human resource manager and now a workplace chaplain-describe a moment when they found themselves wondering if they shouldn't have turned left when the path jutted right.
For many, the angst of the "what-ifs" and "almosts" merely whets an appetite for nostalgia, a harkening back to times when we thought there were still choices to be made and life to be lived with youthful zest. For some, those "what-ifs" leave an ache that fuels thoughts best given voice by Thoreau when he suggested most of us "lead lives of quiet desperation."
For Christians, often these nagging questions vault to a spiritual crisis. Indoctrinated as so many of us are in the myth God has only one perfect design for us-and reminded constantly of our inability to be perfect-we can't help but wonder if our trains didn't jump the tracks long ago. So we read the tales of missionaries from the past and sit in our pews admiring pastors for their commitment to God and convince ourselves we're somehow second-class citizens in the
We were made to matter, and the majesty of God is not just that He created us to live lives that make important contributions but that He continues to provide us-daily-with ways to matter in the places where we find ourselves this moment.
Even more glorious is the discovery that for His children, those who recognize their need for Jesus Christ, there is always redemption as God continues to pick us up even after wrong choices have carried us miles down the path of fruitless living.
He even records it in His Word, this factoid of faithful shepherding: "For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again," Proverbs 24:16 teaches us.
So it is with this life, where an infinitely patient Father picks His own back up and finds new ways for them to matter right where their journeys have carried them. In the pages that follow, we seek to remind each other and ourselves just how often the real world we live in is made whole by the words of the God who created it. Each devotional wrestles with a moment nearly everyone faces and guides us back to the truth that God made us to matter: to Him, to each other, and to this place where we live and work day in and day out.
Then, when even our best efforts to pick ourselves up falter or when we're too tired to take one more step or we're too weak or sick to work, God reminds us of an even deeper truth: that the reason we exist is to be in relationship with Him. So even in those moments when actions are impossible, we haven't lost our worth.
We matter because He made us; we matter because He made us to live and work in community with others; and we matter because He made us to mirror Him every moment of every day in every place. May you draw strength, comfort, inspiration, joy, purpose, and even humor as we travel as co-laborers down the paths we've chosen.