The Search for Significance I

What makes us significant?  What makes us somebody?  What’s the rubber stamp that declares us fit, competent, sufficient, qualified, endorsed, commended?  Is it a bigger house, a better job, a diamond ring?  A TV show, a website?  A girlfriend, a husband? 

For years, I believed my rubber stamp was a bigger church.  That, after all, is the stamp of approval on an American pastor.  How I’ve worried about it, walked the floor over it, got tears in my ears from lying on my back on bed and crying over it.  Don’t get me started!

You’ve got your target; I’ve got mine.  We shoot and we shoot.  Some of us shoot, the arrow flies and–bulls-eye!  We’re on TV.  We’ve got our own deep-fried pickle franchise.  We’ve found significance in a Significant Other.  Others of us shoot and shoot and—aw, shoot!—keep falling short. 

“Here in this urn

From Malaber

The ashes lie

of Jonathan Barr

He sought a higher life

Afar

And traveled home

In a jar”

     On the tombstone of  Jonathan Barr, Nantucket, Rhode Island

We may wonder if that’s where we’re headed:  the sum total of our life…ashes contained in a jar just so big. 

I imagine it galled the apostle Paul, the contempt that certain people had for him, the jar they’d put him into.  He didn’t have a letter of recommendation. His resume wasn’t formidable; it was laughable.  The Corinthians were still laughing about that time he was saved from an irate public official by being lowered over the city wall in a basket (probably called him a basket case).

But what Paul lacked in celebrity, he made up for in significance.  His credentials weren’t written in pen and ink.  He didn’t need a series of videos to endorse him.  His credentials were human lives.