What Matters to God

    I am in the midst of a major relocation.  This has been a year-long process.  During that time, I put much work into going through a house full of personal belongings.  Decisions had to be made about the value of stuff.  My family and I would be moving into a home, although bigger in size, and that would actually have less storage space.  Not only that, but we would be moving to another state, and interstate movers charge a lot of money, mostly determined by weight.  So, the process of going through stuff and deciding what mattered and what didn’t matter was very important.   As my family and I went through our attic of stuff, we discovered a number of boxes still sealed from our previous move, which happened twenty-three years ago!  The reality is that if in twenty-three years we didn’t use whatever was in those boxes, we clearly didn’t need it.  Whatever was in there really didn’t matter.

Holding on to stuff that really doesn’t matter makes moving forward very difficult.  And yet, we hold on to so much.  And perhaps some stuff has value and that’s fine.  Perhaps, even looking at the past and learning from it, both the good and the bad, has some value.  We can’t completely let go of everything.  Some things and experiences in our lives really do matter.  And so is true of the things and experiences of the present. And so it will be with the things and experiences to come.  Each moment of our lives we are presented with the choice:  how much does this matter?  In that discernment, we must judge our concerns by our own set of values.  Those values are reflective of how we are formed.  That formation might be from our family of origin, from our formal education, or just from life experience.  How we are originally formed though can be quite different from our attitudes and approach to life today

 In essence there are so many things that can become our God.  And so, as people of faith, we must constantly ask ourselves, “What of this matters to God?”  In every situation, we must go to our foundation that our lives belong to God.  He is not a God who demands anything that is not in our best interest.  He is a God who is pure love.  He is passionately in love with us.  He is the creator who remains in love with whom he created.  And so, with all that can become the Gods of our life, we must return to the One true God.  As we say each week in the Nicene Creed, “I believe in One God.”  And if that is true, if we believe in one God, what matters to him should be what matters to us.  So, as we go through our “stuff”, instead of asking ourselves does this thing, does this situation, does this concern matter to me, let us ask ourselves, “Does this matter to God?”  

- The Servant