Significance

Each of us cries out for significance. Who hasn’t thought of writing the great American novel, climbing the highest mountain in the world, setting the world’s record in something somewhere, or making the world’s biggest you-name-it?

What about just writing a novel? What about climbing a mountain? How about setting a personal record? Maybe making something new for you?

Nope. It has to be the supreme, the superlative. The greatest, the best, the new record, the biggest. The top. If not, who will notice, who will record those run-of-the-mill efforts? If it’s not an extreme achievement, it’s only average.

When we think of average, we think of other people, never ourselves. After all, who among us wants to be average? Average never stands out; average is the crowd. Standing out seems important to us because we long for significance, and doing something noteworthy seems the only way to be significant.

This week I was thinking about my grandparents. Three of them died before I was twelve, so I really didn’t know them deeply. But they have significance to me and have supported me through the past decade of my life, even though they have been gone for a long time.

My father’s father moved his family and started a business in 1929, the year of the country’s financial crash. He and my grandmother faced great sorrow in their family: a son in his twenties died of spinal cancer, two sons divorced, one son lost a hand in a machinery accident, a daughter contracted tuberculosis when she served as a missionary in Africa. She returned home and later passed away. Another son fought polio. My grandfather spent years as in invalid with Parkinson’s and even then outlived his wife. My mother’s parents had their own share of grief. They buried their first daughter after a botched delivery procedure sent her perfect little body to an early grave.

What do these things have to do with significance? My grandparents were respected in the small town where they lived and made a living. They enjoyed a measure of significance. But as time passes, they won’t be known by the general public. They didn’t leave anything in the Guinness Book of World Records. They don’t have their names on any plaques for climbing, writing, making, doing anything that I know of. Not a single building of my grandfather’s business is left standing, and my other grandfather’s name is no longer on his old office door.

But this is what these people have done for me: they lived lives of endurance, courage, and faith. They kept living, working, and serving until they were finished. The heartbreak they must have faced is absolutely colossal to me, yet they moved dutifully, steadily forward. That is significance. That is powerful.

During some rough times I’ve thought, “How in the world did they do that? How could they stand the pain, the anguish?” They did. They stayed together; they went along day after day doing what they needed to do.

I am a very average person. You probably are, too. If everyone were extraordinary, then that would become the new average! But average doesn’t mean insignificant. We never know who’s watching our lives, who needs to see someone living faithfully every day in a world that craves importance. Significance—at least in one form—is helping someone else hang on, keep going, try a little bit harder, reach a little bit further.

My grandparents are enormously significant to me. Their legacy of courage and steadfastness is an encouraging heritage that strengthens my life. That’s the kind of significance I appreciate and want to leave behind as well.