Searching for significance

Our school unexpectedly closed for two days this week due to illness. Something of this sort happens every winter, but typically the closure is later in the season and I sense it coming. I was blindsided by this one and ill-prepared to entertain my crew during a meeting and a couple of writing related calls. In the middle of one of those (video) calls I looked up to see a child of mine doing this on my office window:

Fortunately, my father-in-law swooped in and saved the day by taking all three kids to get frozen yogurt in the afternoon. 

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is, of course, that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day.” 
C.S. Lewis

Oh, C.S. He always makes me reconsider my perspective. 

For several months I’ve been brainstorming ways I can do meaningful work that contributes both to our family income and to our community. Basically I’m in the midst of a midlife search for significance. I see the people around me doing lifesaving or at least life-enhancing work, including my own medically-oriented family, and I wonder why I’m not doing something similar.

My mom is a speech pathologist and works with patients dealing with stroke damage, dementia, neurodegenerative diseases like ALS, etc. Her patients—many of whom are lonely or struggling—make strides, and her work is important in tangible ways. 

I have a good friend who leads a ministry center that serves the local community with a food pantry, a clothing closet, and emergency assistance. She and the volunteers who work with her are literally the hands and feet of Jesus to marginalized, hurting people.

Another close friend oversees all the volunteers for a major hospital system. She trains and supports the people who make the hospital a kinder, less daunting place. 

I have many friends who are teachers doing front-lines work with preschoolers, kids, and teens. Some of them serve children with special needs. Others serve in hard places where they provide the only encouragement and positive adult interaction a child may have.

Yet, do you know what all of these people have in common? Some days they wonder if they’re doing anything worthwhile. Some days they want to throw in the towel. They question their roles and their impact and their decisions. And I’m starting to think… maybe we all wonder if we’re where we’re supposed to be? Doing what we’re supposed to be doing? Making any difference in the world?

I don’t have a full-time job, a benefits package, or even a name badge. And Satan wants me to believe it’s because I’m not doing anything worth doing. I dare say he whispers similar lies to all of us.

“You’re not enough.”
“Look at your neighbor. She’s saving lives.”
“See him? He’s going places. You’re going nowhere.”
“You would be better if…”

What a heyday the devil can have when he allow him to get into our heads, or worse yet, into our hearts.

Several years ago when we were first married, my husband was struggling to find purpose in his work as a pharmacist. The hours are long, the tasks monotonous, and he was telling a local minister how it didn’t feel like meaningful work. This wise man told him over dinner one night that he views the exchange of medicine between a pharmacist and a patient as similar to the exchange of the Eucharist between a priest/pastor and a parishioner. The spiritual and physical meet. And with that observation, he spoke new meaning into my spouse’s professional life at a time when he was doubting. 

I’m not suggesting that picking up your antibiotics is the same as taking Communion. But sometimes we all need someone to help us make sense of our story. We need a big picture, long haul perspective that gives us hope that our “today” counts. We need someone to remind us to put our head down, stay in our lane, and keep running the race in front of us. Even if that race feels boring or unimportant.  

Bob Goff says, “Sometimes it helps to think about what it might mean in the lives of the people around you, those you love the most, if you would stay the course.”

Maybe we would do better, at least I know I would, to look less for significance {which is already secured for all of us in Christ}, and look more at the ground beneath us and the people around us.

Even when those people are smashing their face against our office window.

This is, after all, “the life God is sending one day by day.” And that’s pretty significant stuff.