Significance III

This is turning out to be a trilogy!

Just one more thing to say about significance.

What is significant is a matter of perspective. Just as the birth of Christ is the most significant event to us, it is but a nice holiday for others, a time to feel good, warm and fuzzy - peace on earth and goodwill to all men... A time for parties, revelry, Christmas trees and gifts. 

Nothing wrong with that. We should not be a party pooper. It just occurred to me that it might be significant for a particular group of non-believers, but for very different reasons. Christmas has become an industry, the most wonderful time of the year for some. It makes or breaks their business. How did it come to that? I guess at some time in the past when the Western world was still fairly religious and mainly Christian, the significance of Christmas shifted from faith to profit. from Christ to Santa. And no doubt there would have been defenders of that, who would argue that the two aren't mutually exclusive, that it is possible for both to be significant to them.

It is possible but challenging, for obvious reasons. The interesting corollary to that is whether the pursuit of money, and the rewards that money brings, contributed to the decline of faith in the West.  A question to mull over.

This wasn't really what I wanted to say about significance as I began writing. Sometimes though, maybe because of Him, ideas and words come to me and take me in a different direction. 

I had wanted to talk about small things. About things that do not assume significance at the time, but only in hindsight. Because we look at it then through a different lens, a different perspective. Why does this matter? Because our nature is to focus on the big events, the shiniest things, beauty... So they almost always assume a significance that is disproportionate in the grand scheme of things - from our perspective as believers.

And we then tend to overlook the small but significant things, because we are not wired that way. If we don't look for and recognise their significance, we become callous towards people, we take kindness for granted, we believe we are masters of our own destinies, that our successes are solely down to our own efforts. Though this has and likely will happen again, the good thing is that we can always look back and realise what we owe to God.

What are these small things? Well, yesterday something like that happened! I came across and shared a FB post with the following quote: "When people talk about travelling to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small, but barely anyone in the present really thinks that they can radically change the future by doing something small." Serendipitous?

There have been too many of these moments since I started looking back at my life through new lens for it to be serendipity. The lesson for me is to pay attention and hopefully I recognise them for what they are at the time. The corollary to this is to not get too down when things I think important do not pan out. When I think back to those events in my life that caused me a great deal of grief or anguish or whatever, they take on a new light. Disappointments that cut to the bone at the time feel as if they were a natural progression to who and where I am now, as a sort of growing pain I had to go through. Remember God is there for us always in all things great and small.