When you think of the word “significance,” what comes into your mind? Do you equate significance with self-worth? Pleasing your figures of authority? Money? Wealth? A thriving career?
A lot of people define “significance” as being able to fulfill their parents’ dreams for themselves. These people think in terms of becoming a doctor, a businessman, or some such other career that they believe would please their parents.
But what if you, as an individual would pursue these, and in the end, would come up with nothing to show for your efforts? What if, by the time you wake up from your career-chasing haze, you would realize that you are no emptier from the other person who chased after material things?
Man’s search for significance is rooted in that God-given desire to mean something. The only question is, “To whom/what should we mean something to?”
Some people derive meaning from leaving a legacy, a name for him/herself. From being the next Bill or Melinda Gates, who have left a mark in thousands of people’s lives through their benevolence. But what if your humanitarian efforts won’t dispel the nagging feeling that you should be living for something bigger?
That’s where faith and a relationship with God comes in. How can you be sure that your efforts would have eternal relevance or significance, unless you would know what God really plans for you? And how would you know how your God thinks, unless you know Him?
There are people who climb up the corporate ladder, get promotions left and right, get indisputably wealthy, then in the middle of their corporate-conquering efforts, a fire, a flood, a stock market crash wrecks everything they’ve built their lives around.
People can easily fool themselves into believing that there is no God to live for. That there would be no afterlife, that all that there is to life is the next party or the next gadget. I hope none of us wakes up one day to shambles of what’s left of a life, with nothing to cling to, because we have decided to forsake our God.
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