Sunday afternoons will often find me enjoying my new riding mower. Last week I was mowing a maze into a pasture and wishing I had small children around to appreciate it. But it was just me and acres of partially cut grass. A cold front was coming in and every time I turned the mower to the west, the north wind sandblasted me with the dust of a million grains of shredded grass.
I found a source online that says an acre contains 156 million blades of grass. Think about this: which is more important? Me or a single blade of grass? Can you even compare the two? Yes. Believe it or not, God finds the two lives comparable.
It is a hard truth—but true, nonetheless—that no human life is really that big a deal. Human life and culture is all that we see, and we are deceived into thinking nothing matters more than SIGNIFICANCE. Young people want to be famous, rich, and powerful. You idolize great men of history like Washington and Churchill, or titans of industry like Rockefeller, or world changers like Edison and Einstein, or writers and thinkers like Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis.
But this is the truth: YOU’RE NOT THAT BIG A DEAL.
And you know what else?
THOSE FAMOUS PEOPLE YOU ADMIRE? ALSO NOT THAT BIG A DEAL.
God offers words of comfort when He says a human life is like a single blade of grass—it is short-lived and hardly noticed.
“Comfort, comfort My people … All humanity is grass, and all its goodness is like the flower of the field … The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the word of our God remains forever” Isaiah 40:1; Isaiah 40:6-8. (See also Ecclesiastes.)
He goes on to say “the nations are like a drop in a bucket and are considered as a speck of dust in the scales” and the people of earth are like grasshoppers in the field, Isaiah 40:15; 40:22. How can that be? How is it that EVERYTHING we have ever done on earth is small and meaningless? Because we have never seen the infinite God who made the world. If He is in your story, then OF COURSE you are as small as a speck of dust. And you can take comfort in that: you are not responsible for the universe, world peace, saving the whales, or actually much of anything. You have one or two tiny responsibilities to your family and community. And guess what? God is with you. He matters. And He can make your life matter.
“Do not fear for I am with you … I will strengthen you, surely I will help you, surely I will hold on to you with my righteous right hand” Isaiah 41:10.
Do you feel lost in the crowd? Do you feel like your life does not matter? Welcome to normal. Walk with God, holding His hand, and keep storing up treasures in heaven. In heaven the things you have done on earth will matter forever.
“Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroy and where thieves cannot break in and steal” Matthew 6:20.
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