We have an innate desire to not die before we make a true and lasting impact. The problem with that sometimes is that impact is undefined and unclear. We use all our energy to make this phantom impact that no one, including us, has clearly defined. We work hard for something we do not know if we are achieving or have achieved. We sacrifice everything and at the end, we really don’t know what we sacrificed it for. If someone asked, we would probably say it is because I want my life to matter. If we were even more honest, we would say because I want to matter.
What mattering looks like, no one really knows. We unhealthily go through life feeling we do not matter and want to be significant one day. Regardless of how much “success” we have, we feel like a bit more would mean more! We never really get the feeling that we have arrived! It is a journey with and uncertain destination and no one is sure once we arrive. I would like to suggest: we already matter. We are struggling to be what God already told us we are. We are on a journey to feel like we matter to someone and we do not know that we already matter to God. We matter so much that he gave everything to reconcile us to himself. We forget that he said things like this in the Bible:
(Jeremiah 31,3b)
3 “ I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore, I have continued to extend faithful love to you.”
When we live trying to get everyone else to like us, accept us or love us, we compromise what we are to become something that we think they can like and accept. At the end, they don’t like us because they think we are fake; we don’t like ourselves because we feel that we are not ourselves and God is sitting on the sidelines waiting. Waiting for us to realize that the life he has meant for us to have is better than the one we try to make up as we go along. He is waiting for us to realize that the person he made us to be is better than the person we try to make ourselves in the pursuit for to be acceptable.
The only acceptable response to love is to give yourself to it. When we tell someone we love them, we are not doing this because we expect their money or gifts. When we tell someone that we love them, we want them to give themselves to us. The only satisfying response would be to receive them and not a trinket from them. God has told you he loves you and the only way to respond to that love is to give yourself to him in return. Every other thing is a trinket that isn’t quite enough. Deep down you know you were called to live like that: you were called to live a given life. You were called to give your life to someone greater than you. That is when you become your most honest self: when you live your life in relationship with God. There are no satisfactory substitutes! You are all he wants. You are enough.