The pieces of life...

A friend of mine on FaceBook had someone tell him to stop, “…making everyone’s Facebook [his] own little scratch pad for useless comments and nonsense." Okay, wait, I thought that was what Facebook was about. It’s for sharing your life with other people: the heartache, the joy, the nonsense, and often the trivial of life. Let’s be honest, most of life IS pretty trivial, at least life on this planet.

Think about your life. How much of it is really meaningful? You sleep in the same bed. You wake to do the same basic routines you do every morning. You go through your day, with work, school, or family, and do the same thing you probably did the day before or close to it. You come home and do mostly what you do every night after work and before bed. You climb into the same bed and wake in the morning to start it all over again.

I don’t mean to depress you, and that is pretty depressing, but that is why we need to find meaning in the trivial. That’s why we need to find meaning in the monotonous and the mundane.

I once had a boss laugh at my ability to find joy in the little things. I told him, “You’ve got to find joy in the little things, because the big things don’t come along very often.” He thought that was funny, but he also died alone and an alcoholic.

God lives in the meaningful, for sure, but He really shines in the trivial. It is in the trivial where we can see Him best, because it is then that our lives are empty enough to be able to allow Him room.

Someone once said, God is a gentleman. He won’t force His way into your life, He waits to be asked. He knocks, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me (Rev. 3:20, NAS),” and then waits to be invited in.

It is in the trivial, the monotonous and the mundane that we need to find purpose. It is in those times when our heart most cries out for meaning. It is then that we can best hear His knocking. We just need to open the door to find meaning.

In a talk I gave a few years ago, I compared our lives to a stained glass window. All the pieces of glass are meaningless, pretty, but meaningless and it is only when we allow those pieces to be used for the bigger picture that God's light can shine though and create a thing of beauty. God takes all the pieces of our lives, including the trivial, the mundane, and the monotonous, puts them together into a beautiful picture and then shines through so we will be a light in a dark world.