Feeling insignificant??

Many times I have feelings of insignificance.

• Does anyone around here know that I exist?
• Do you see that I'm cleaning the bathrooms and making sure dinner is on the table each and every night at six?
• Do you know the mysterious person who folds your laundry and reinserts it back into your dresser drawers?

Does this pity party sound awful or what?

Ugh.

I hate the disgruntled thoughts that plague my mind when I throw a pity party. "Woe is me." I know 'for sure and for certain' that I've worked myself into this corner of frustration, annoyance and discontent.

In my heart, I know that God's 'eye is on the sparrow,' but I also know that an eagle or a parrot or a great blue heron attracts a lot more attention than just one more common brown sparrow.

Why do I always feel like a brown sparrow?

What significance is there in folding laundry? making spaghetti? and cleaning a bathroom? Sometimes I wonder what significance my relatively small life could have for me, let alone for the world and for God.

My significance "wake-up call" comes in the form of a phone call and a medical diagnosis. It rattles my self-pity to the core and everything is brought back into balance.

From this side, I can now see how this way of thinking was dead wrong. In fact, it was really an insult to me and the God who created me in his image and made me just as I was. Being named Cheryl Renee Riggs and baptized in the Christian church that my parents attended; growing up as the youngest with an older brother; a grandmother who adored me and lavished her love on me; numerous women who mentored and guided me as a young woman; a phenomenal ministry experience that shaped and molded me-----all were essential parts of my own story.

As I look back, what surprises and delights me most is the definite shape to it all, the way that the most consequential events in my personal narrative were usually unintended but now seem to be so essential.

I was given a unique set of experiences and a life history that belonged completely to me. Sometimes it is hard for us to claim our own voice with its specific timbre and accent, to walk down the pathway that lies before us, to choose the life that we are given.

Today, my own inability to claim the significance of my story/life might not result in a life of addiction or depression, but it has shown my flagrant disregard (many times) for the precious gift of a life created in Anderson, Indiana.