Who Am I?
Recently, I was sitting at the breakfast table, caught up in deep thought. For whatever reason that morning, my mind had been drawn to the reality of my daily existence.
Ann, noticing my far away look, asked me: “What are you thinking about?”, to which I replied, “I’m nothing but a speck on a gnat’s rear end.”
That phrase comes from my growing up years in Alabama. If you wanted to tell someone how worthless they were, you would say, “You’re not even a speck on a gnat’s rear end”
The conclusion I had arrived at that morning came from an unvarnished look at my life and circumstances compared to, what appears to me as, the innumerably greater, better, more significant, lives and circumstances in the world about me. As an elderly person, I think about and strive to find meaning and purpose in a life that feels increasingly useless.
As I write this, I can hear the protests. “You shouldn’t feel that way…you are _______ (fill in the blank) .“
But, alas, there is something freeing about bringing the reality of my insignificance into the light of God’s love for me and thoughts about me. It’s what I see David expressing in Psalm 8:
“When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?”
We resist the truth of our existence but it is only in our insignificance that we will find our significance.
I stood alone on the wet, sandy seashore
In the presence of the Sea.
Its waters extended endlessly,
Beyond the horizon
Touching infinity.
The sounds of waves rolling
And crashing against the shore
Roared like the majestic dawning of creation,
Deafening in its might.
Colors blurred into every shade
Of blue and black and green and white.
I tasted the salt in my mouth,
And breathed it into my life.
The light of the eastern sky broke through
Billowing clouds of cotton and blue,
Dark clouds receding, retreating before the light.
Towering black cliffs loomed massive behind me,
Laid along side one another
Like giant steeples of stone
Reaching up until lost in the mist
Of blanketing clouds above.
I stood in the awesome, infinite presence of the Sea,
Of ineffable mystery.
And simultaneously I saw myself from above,
One speck on a vast shining shore,
A shoreline stretching farther than the eye could see,
Lost in the distance to the embrace of the Sea.
And I felt significant.
I felt significant only because of my insignificance.
Yet I stood in the Presence of Ultimate Reality,
Of Another, of the Holy Other.
I felt acceptance and affirmation,
Security and peace.
I belonged to the Sea.
It had let me be
To become a valued entity.
It had named me,
To forget me now an impossibility.
God knew me.
God knew my name,
The journey of my life.
And God loved me.
Excerpted from Frank Tupper’s “A Scandalo
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