Does anything that I do matter? After all, I don’t do anything that significant. I go to class, go to work, do my homework, see my friends once in a while, and participate in extracurriculars. I go to church and serve on the worship team once a month. It is so easy to look at these things as mundane, ordinary, and insignificant. Life flies past me and I often feel like I’m scrambling just to keep up. This often leads me to think, Is this all that there is? How do we find significance?
This past Sunday, my pastor talked about how we never live a single insignificant moment. At first, I wondered how this could be possible. I was sure I had lived many insignificant moments. Then I thought, have I been passing through millions of significant moments and been blind to them?
And then I found this bible verse:
“Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” –Genesis 2:7
Dust is just about the most insignificant thing I could possibly imagine. What do we do with dust? Brush it off, shake it out, sweep it up. It means nothing to us, yet God looked at the dust of the earth and thought, I will craft my greatest creation from this, which completely dismantled my view of what is insignificant. If God found the dust to be such a valuable tool, that says something about the things that I have in my life. We give significance to things and situations.
When I think back to my childhood, I remember the most obscure moments. I remember ridiculously simple things that brought me joy: laying on the warm asphalt in the summertime, watching the snowfall out of the front window, the M*A*S*H theme song playing as my mom made dinner and my dad got home from work, and being curled up in the corner of my room reading a good book. What made those things so memorable? Because they meant something to me. I found significance in them. Were they important? Life-changing? No. They were simple, ordinary, and mundane.
I think those are the dust moments – insignificant moments that we pay attention to and see the beauty in. I want to make beauty out of the dust.
