Significant

Recently a friend of mine posted on his blog about how, for most of us, our names will be forgotten within a few generations.  Perhaps for those of us without children it might be even less.

I know there are days when I wonder about what I am doing. I want to be doing something significant, and plugging away at learning to communicate with the Thai people in their heart language just doesn't seem to qualify as one of those things--especially on those days when I mess up so bad.  (Well, at least on those occasions I may have given someone something to laugh about.)


But the fact that our name does not live on does not mean that our lives do not have an impact.  And the reality is we never know completely, at least in this life, what the eternal significance of the impact of our lives is, for good or bad.

This got me thinking about windmills like the ones pictured above near Tehachapi, California.  Windmills are seemingly a fairly benign source of renewable energy.  We do know what some of the impacts of the windmills are, positive and negative.  But we certainly don’t know all of them.

Windmills take energy from the wind.  After the wind passes through the windmills, it has less energy than before.  That energy used to be dissipated somewhere else, but we don’t know exactly where and we don’t know what the effects of the loss of that energy downwind will be.  It could be good.  It could be bad.  While mathematically it could theoretically be calculated what the impacts are, the number of variables is almost unfathomable.

The truth is we don’t live in a vacuum.  Everything we do affects our environment or the people around us in some way.  There are also impacts in the spiritual realm that we cannot see.

What that does mean is that we have to be careful about the decisions and choices that we make.  True, no one person may be watching—though these days it is hard to escape the views of security cameras, webcams and phone cameras—and even if God were somehow not aware, it does not mean our choices do not have consequences.
So we need to choose carefully and decide wisely.

One of my favorite passages from the Bible is Hebrews 12:1-4.  The writer here talks about a “great cloud of witnesses”—referring to the great heroes of the faith that have gone before us—as if they are watching us as we go through the race of life.  The picture I get in my mind is of a stadium full people cheering at an athletic event or the people lining the road of a marathon course who cheer on and encourage the runners.  We are being watched.  People do care, even if we do not see them.  And these aren’t just any people.  These are people who encountered great trials and tribulations in this life but somehow managed to persevere to the end.  And it was worth it.  These are the people who cheer us on.

So let us, as the writer says in these verses, “lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.  Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.” (Hebrews 12:1-3 ESV)

Our lives DO matter. We are significant.

One day we can be part of that great cloud of witnesses cheering others on in their races.