I have been on the road the past two weeks and it’s been tough to find the time for a blog.

Right now my daughter’s mother-in-law and I have been trading off  driving about every 3 hours. We went to my daughter Rachel’s graduation from Purdue University at IUPUI in Mechanical Engineering.

We are moving her and her husband back to the Seattle area so she can start her new job. Anyway, as Jane, her mother-in-law, and I trek cross-country, I am reminded of past road trips to visit family and moving around with my husband’s career. America is big and the land is vast and diverse with its people. But it’s also a reminder of a how much bigger world we live in beyond this nation. Then conversely, I start to think about how really small this planet earth is within a huge universe and then my perspective changes to  how small we truly are and how very big God really is. That is reality.

That our big God cared to give us such a unique terrain to live on and with everything we need to survive on it amazes me. He also made people so unique with their different cultures, traditions, etc. What I love about God is that He believes that each and every one of us is so important that He gave us a free-will and opportunity to explore and find Him while here on this planet. People matter to God and they should matter to us.  Every time I look at another human being, I remind myself, this is a child of God, regardless of whether they love or serve Him.  Each one of us comes with our own stories: troubles and joys. And these stories that we are made of is what makes us unique. And yet we are significant to Him in all our ways, “what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you should care for him?” (Psalm 8:4, ESV)

Keeping a right perspective helps keep us humble and from thinking we are bigger than we are. No, we are very small, but we are very important to the God who created us. A narrowed focus can keep us stuck; thinking beyond ourselves reminds us there is more to life than just us here on this earth. When we can reach past ourselves to others around us, it pulls us out of our inward focus to do something good for someone else, to learn their story, to learn to appreciate and love them right where they are at. All of the sudden, our problems seem smaller.