Do I Matter?

Do you ever have days where you feel empty inside; like there is nothing left in you to give?

Every once in a while I become overwhelmed with my daily battles and I also tend to over-sympathize with everyone else’s daily battles.  It breaks me when my husband is having a rough week or someone in my family seems to be feeling low.

I think at the end of this oppressive feeling I get every so often is the simple question, “Do I matter?”  Normally I am confident that the answer is yes, yes, and definitely yes because I put my faith in a God who claims to care for even the birds in the sky.  But some days, I sense the heaviness of a fallen world all around me and I can’t help but start to sink.

There was a time in my life where I use to have recurring dreams that I was drowning.  No matter how hard I tried to keep my head above water, I would keep getting pulled back under by roaring bodies of water.  I know what it is like to feel like you are drowning in everyday life and to wonder if your life matters at all.

Lately, I have been hearing the phrase over and over, “To be known is to be loved and to be loved is to be known.”  I have been chewing on these words for several months now as I keep hearing them through different speakers and writers.  It is easy to feel unknown as we travel through this life like gypsies searching for a place of acceptance.

The human heart screams to be known.  It demands to be loved.  It cannot function properly without love.  Yet, our name can be known by thousands of people and we can still feel misunderstood, unknown, and unloved.

Perhaps my least favorite feeling is to be misunderstood.  Someone I really like got it into his head that I resent men. This frustrated me very much since it could not be further from the truth.  Men have taught me some of the greatest things I know and I have never been traumatized at the hands of a man.

The point is that as a writer, I am very open about my life, yet I am still misunderstood.  When I feel misunderstood, my gut reaction is that the person misunderstanding me doesn’t know who I am at all.  That thought breeds the negative feeling that I am unloved.

But what if it doesn’t matter if I am misunderstood by people?  What if I truly believe that the maker of the universe does not just know my name; but, “gets my heart” and actually likes me?  What if I start to put my faith in a God who understands me, knows me deeply, and loves me endlessly?

If I really believed this, how could I ever feel like I don’t matter?  Religion is a lot like processed foods.  It looks like food, it taste like food, but it is not real food.  Just the same, religion looks like spirituality, it taste like spirituality, but it is not real spirituality.

Just as we settle on constant junk food when we are rushed or depressed in life, we also settle on religion even when we have tasted and seen real spirituality.  We remember to dwell with “religious people,” and attend services, but we forget to dwell with our God. He has founded this entire world for one reason and it is to have a divine connection to His creation.

We matter because He says we matter.  We matter because He “gets us.”  In His presence we don’t have to sit around and try and explain ourselves because He already knows exactly who we are.  He is not troubled by our weaknesses or ashamed of our faults. He is as a father who knows every scar and birth mark on his child’s body and as a mother who knows exactly why her infant is feeling insecure.

He understands us and knows how to fix our broken souls.  There is peace and fulfillment for us.  I matter and you matter too my darling because we are the apple of our daddy’s eye.

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