Fifty.
This number can evoke different feelings depending on the context.
Fifty dollars. If you find it, it’s a blessing. If you lose it, it’s a curse.
Fifty feet. If you’re that far from a bear in the woods, you have a head start. If you’re that far from your car in a rainstorm, you’re likely getting soaked.
Fifty minutes. If you have that long until you have to go to work, the time will fly by. If you have that long until class is over, it feels like an eternity.
Fifty years.
This is the reality I face today.
18,263 days. 438,312 hours. 26,298,720 minutes. At 5:22 PM, on May 14, 2020, that’s how long I have been taking breaths and experiencing this world. That’s a lot of time.
But it’s also not much time at all. Scientists estimate the world is approximately 4.54 billion years old. That makes my 50 years 0.0000011013216% of the history of the world. Man, that’s a small percentage.
I am also one of over seven billion people alive right now on planet Earth. And one glance into the nighttime sky tells me that I am but a dust particle on a dust particle in the universe. This can make me seem fairly insignificant if I dwell on it.
But, as Paul Harvey used to say, this is the rest of the story.
I am significant. I am a child. I am a parent. I am a friend. To a handful of the seven billion people in this world, I am important. My love, my compassion, my life, they have meaning to those people. My choices, good or bad, impact those people’s lives.
After fifty years, I’ve learned I’m less important than I thought I was and more important than I believed I was. Living in this tension is the pathway to peace. I am both inconsequential and essential. I live in the divine and the divine lives in me. That reality grounds me and upholds me.
I don’t know how many minutes, hours, days, or years I have left. I could die tomorrow, or I could live another fifty years. This is the fragility and unpredictability of life. Every breath matters.
That does not mean every moment requires productivity or busyness. There is no reason to hustle to earn your worth. Rather, your value is primarily in your presence, not your productivity.
Be where you are. Be who you are.
This is no small feat. The world demands we earn our worth. The world, and even sometimes religion if we’re honest, teaches us that we must believe the right things, work hard, and be good to achieve value.
It has taken me nearly fifty years to learn this, but we are inherently good. We are loved, even when we are unlovable. We are forgiven, even when we make mistakes. When we can see beyond the flaws and brokenness and look deep inside ourselves, we can see this is the place where the divine dwells.
Our task in this life is not to try to be good enough, it is to uncover and unleash the goodness which already exists and share it with the world.
Breaking Into Peace 