Does it Matter?

I'm a relatively unimportant person. I'm important to a few people...my kids, my husband...and the dog. I am very important to the dog. I carry a bit of weight around particular tasks in my job. I'm the one who organizes Sunday school, for example. People think that makes me important, but it doesn't, really. Anyone could do it. I just happen to be the one in this time and place that gets it done.

I don't have a powerful job or lots of money. Therefore, I have little influence in the business or political spheres. Like most of you, my representatives to congress think I am worthy of a form letter and not much more. I guess I should be thankful that an e-mail or phone call gets a form letter...but letter never has anything to do with the opinion I express.

I have moments of importance. When I inquire about buying a car listed on the internet, I am important until the salesman figures out I wanted to pay the "gotcha" price and not something four to six thousand dollars higher. When I have time or skill that someone needs, I am important.

But in the grand scheme of things...I'm not going to be in the history books. My face will not beam from a granite mountaintop. I haven't started a movement, and I have resisted, so far, the impulse to murder anyone.

I was listening to Dave Isay talk about starting StoryCorps on NPR, "a project to give people of all backgrounds the chance to share and record the stories of their lives." He describes writing a book about homeless people in a New York City neighborhood. He brought the galley of the book to the flophouse and one of the guys opened to his page and ran down the hall shouting "I exist! I exist!" That, for Isay, was the "clarion call." He began StoryCorps to "tell [people] their lives matter and they won't be forgotten."

Now I am fully human, and there are times I wish I was important. Moments call out for recognition beyond the dog's total adoration and attention (which, you understand, happens for the 15 seconds before he eats, while the food is sitting on the floor and he is "waiting" for permission). I'm not dead yet, so I occasionally dream about writing a book like Eugene Peterson, painting a picture like Georgia O'Keefe, or singing like my daughter.

But here's the thing. My life matters and I won't be forgotten. I commit my life to the idea that I have been invited to participate in the mission of God, the God who creates, redeems, sustains, rules and transforms all things and all people. "Importance" in this culture doesn't really matter. What's important is how God chooses to use our lives, and we don't have to know how that shakes out.

I don' t even need a book to tell me I exist. I am a child of God. That gives what I do right the power and influence of God's very self...and what I do wrong gets dismissed or re-routed into what God will use for God's ultimate purposes. Today, I sit at my desk, type on this little, unimportant blog, write curriculum for the Christian formation of this congregation, and celebrate that I exist in the mind and heart and purposes of God. In that, my life matters and I will never be forgotten.