Amounting to Much

Spending a year as a chaplain at Matheny, a hospital for severely disabled children, was one of the most frustrating years of my life. Sure, it was sad and hard and tiring. But most of all, it frustrated my sense of accomplishment. I couldn't help these kids, fix them or help them become better people. Most were going to die young, with no hope of 'making a difference'. I could only love them  and that imperfectly.

I had been used to serving the high achievers. The people who were going to make a difference in the world. In these relationships, even as we talked about grace, we all knew that we had were supposed to do something great.

A harsh law that hangs over all of us raised in a culture of success - where doing good and doing well are equally demanding competitions. We must amount to something. People like the kids at Matheny reminded me that our achievements are not our final metric.

That’s why I loved this story on Slate. Cristina is a single mum raising her daughter, Eurydice, who has Down Syndrome. The whole article is a great read as a carefree and upwardly mobile woman comes to grips with the pain and joy of raising her daughter. But the part that jumped out at me was when she talked about her daughter's accomplishments. She says;

"Am I “cheerily generalizing” as [another author] says of other Down syndrome parents, “from a few accomplishments” of my child? Perhaps I am. But one thing I've learned these last four years... All of our accomplishments are few. All of our accomplishments are minor: my scribblings, his book, the best lines of the best living poets. We embroider away at our tiny tatters of insight as though the world hung on them, when it is chiefly we ourselves who hang on them."

When we can release on our pride in our achievements, we can focus on using our abilities great and small to love one another. That's a God perspective. Even our great achievements are pretty small in the scheme of things. But what if we already did amount to something? Not because we did something great - but because we were loved and got to love in return.

The joy Eurydice takes in each detail of life is the most infectious quality I’ve ever known. When she flings her arms around my neck as she does every day, every night, my most recurrent fear is no longer relapsing cancer, no longer early dementia or heart disease or hearing loss—or even the fact that Eurydice is growing up too slowly. It is a testament to how radically this child has transformed me that my most recurrent fear may be that she’s growing up too fast—that one day she could be too mature to give me those massive, resplendent, full-body hugs.

In our church, we are blessed with people who are very successful in the eyes of the world. And with people who don’t amount to much in the eyes of the world. But in truth, none of what we do amounts to much. It's what God has done that makes us amount to anything.