Do I Matter?

What a question to ask:  do I matter?  It is a loaded question but if we want to be all God created us to be, we have to ask it often.  A person with purpose and meaning can live through the most horrific times.  I recently watch Bridge on the River Quai, which is about a group of British P.O.W's in a Japanese prison camp.  In order to keep up morale, the British officers actually volunteered to build a bridge for the Japanese.  The work, the larger purpose of construction kept the prisoners focused on something larger than their bondage.

I love the quote from Fred Buechner, The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. Buechner beautifully identifies that our joy and the world's needs both have to be taken care of for us to make maximum impact...to matter.  He uses the illustration of someone serving as a doctor in a leper colony and hating it and someone writing TV deodorant commercials as people who are missing the mark of achieving meaning in the world.  The two key questions to wrestle with are:

• What makes my heart sing?


• What does my world need?

These two questions may take a long time to work out and the path that unfolds might be a new vocation.  May I give a bit of advice while you are getting there.  The obvious is don't quit your day job.  The less obvious is to start evaluating yourself at your current calling.  One way to do this is to have either a weekly or daily review by asking 4 important/meaning questions.

1.  What did I do today to communicate clearly with my boss and peers?

2.  Did I learn and grow professionally?

3.  Did I engage today with our organizations long-term goals in mind?

4.  Who did I thank or care for today?

I think if ever worker asked these goals each evening while they were planning their 'tomorrows' we would all be able to answer the question: do I matter?  Something else happens when we start taking these questions seriously, we prepare ourselves for our next assignment that is just around the corner.