Significant Being

Have you ever met a person looking to live an insignificant life? I have not. Yet, strangely most of us can’t even remember the name of our great-grandfather.

If the secret sauce to a significant life is significant doing then problem solved because we are all intoxicated with doing, and doing much more. We are in the process of ordering journals, joining gyms, scouring apps to help us accomplish more this next year. If it offers “more” in 2020 then bring it on goes our reasoning. I have found most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and undervalue what they can accomplish in five years.

Let me ask you a few questions to consider. What if significance wasn’t connected to the verb “do”? What if significance was connected to the verb “be”? Yes, not doing something, but being someone. I loved this paraphrase of Philippians 1:6:

There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.

Did you see that? God’s promise is to complete the work He began “in you.” First and foremost, Christ is interested in WHO you are becoming way before he is concerned with what you are doing. So what if you changed your New Years’ resolutions from “to do’s” to “to be’s” What if you wrote out who you want to be on December 31, 2020, instead of what you want to accomplish by the stroke of midnight? What if your focus was on significant being instead of significant doing? So for example, this year I want to become a person who asks more questions than making assumptions.

What I am suggesting is a paradigm change and would require all kinds of changes in your thinking; like spending more energy this year guarding your heart than guarding your time, greater thought given on the way you accomplish a goal than how many goals you accomplish, finding greater joy in human being than human doing, seeing people not as stepping stones, but as image-bearers, or finally celebrating each day in the journey not simply checking off a box at the end of a day.

Yesterday is over, and tomorrow is not promised, so go “be” for Him today.