SOME OF OUR PARTS
I had to take Strengths Finder for work a few months ago. I had test anxiety, but it turns out I'm Intellection, Relator, Strategic, Input, & Ideation. I don't know what those mean when teased apart from one another, but together they make a whole and that whole is me.
(And I'm in the .08th percentile with those odds, so I have that going for me.)
(Or not.)
Have you seen the photo of the earth that has been circulating recently?
My computer screen at work is large, as large as the iMac comes, but at the end of the day, it's just a 27 inch iMac screen in a couple thousand square foot office, in one of the smaller towns in the DFW metroplex of Texas (probably the only really large thing in this equation). But I opened those high resolution photos and gasped at my 27 inch screen. I scrolled down to Texas second; New York isn't visible and I know that because it's where I looked first. There, under the cumulus clouds, on January 4th, it was life as usual for some on these parts.
Did you know that when you're looking at a photo of the real earth, there are no border lines or country distinctions? It is just land and sea, every man for his own, a grand and graceful show of glory.
Soren Kierkegaard said, "Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are."
Sitting in front of a 27 inch iMac I am faced with the fact that I am very, very small. And my distinctions are very, very meaningless. And my boundaries and borders are very, very nebulous.
I have a roommate who is a quiet voice of reason in our home full of opinions and personality, and she won't let us put her in any category, box or otherwise. If we say that she is an introvert, she shrugs her shoulders and rebuts with witticism. If we say she is peaceful, she points out all the ways she is the antithesis of peace. If we want to know her love language, she demands that we give and receive them all from her. I am grateful for a girl like her in my life, because aren't we really the sum of our parts?
I have been dividing things in my heart the past week, trying to determine where I land and why I land there and how to communicate it and if it needs to be communicated and this is what I have concluded, just tonight: I am a very small pile of strengths in a very large earth without boundaries, and the God who's adopted me has the whole World in His hands (and who's kidding who? He's got the whole universe on his thumbnail.).
What I am matters very little. Where I live matters less. What I do is a drop in the bucket. Whose lives I affect is minimal. Whose hands I hold is debatable. What strengths I have are susceptible. And what percentage I fall in is pitiable.
Someone said to do what makes you happy and here is what I know: there is no greater joy than being a minute part of a whole that shouts by its very nature of the Glory of God.
Enoch walked with God and was no more.
I could not do better with my own small life.
