Why Are We Here? (Part 1)
One sunny Saturday morning, our nine-year old neighbor tapped on the screen door, leaning her bike against the wall, and peered inside, “Whatcha doing today, Miss Jeannie?”
I glanced up from my laptop, where I sat wrapped in a yellow blanket on the couch, still in my pajamas at noon, “I’m writing another book,” I said.
“What are you gonna call it?” she asked, her cheek now pressed against the screen.
I paused and decided to consider her part of my first focus group, “Maybe something about becoming people who could change the world,” I said. “By the way, the door is open. Come in, and tell me, what do you think of that?”
She swung open the door, trotted across the room, plunked down next to me and said confidently, “Oh, that’s way too much pressure. I don’t think I should be expected to change the world. That’s too big.”
I closed my laptop. “You know, God actually created you to change the world. From the very beginning. Actually, God meant for you to rule the world.”
She leaned in. “What do you mean?”
“In the beginning, God created light, and sky, and separated the water with land. He made some plants and animals too but it seems the trees and plants and such were only a small part of the earth that he called the Garden of Eden. God looked around and said, who’s gonna take care of this place, who’s gonna run it…and expand it?”
I drew her a picture of the earth and drew a few palm trees on a little part of it.
“That’s when God made Adam, the first man, and then Eve, the first woman. You know what he told them to do?”
She shook her head as I googled Genesis 1.
“Here look, it says in verse 28, “Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” He basically told them they were the boss of the earth, and they had a job, to change the world by making the rest of the earth as wonderful as the Garden of Eden. Make things grow and spread.”
“You Can Change the World!”
Since that conversation with my honest young friend, I started dropping the phrase, “Let’s change the world!” or “You can change the world!” to random people, the teen at the grocery checkout, a teacher at school, my husband, even a future cross-cultural worker getting ready to move overseas.
Usually I got a slight smile and raised eyebrows that translated to a “Me? Yeah, right” or “Good luck with that, you positive (and unrealistic) Pollyanna” or “If God wants to, I hope he does it.”
Not so different than my neighbor girls response, “That’s way too big. I don’t think I should be expected to change the world.”
What if we got real with our motivations, priorities and decisions we’re making everyday in life and, if we’re honest with ourselves, we resonate with these people, all of whom say they are committed followers of Jesus:
Just-making-do Jeff: You know, I work hard in my career. I provide for my family. I sponsor a couple children and give to my church when I have extra. I take my neighbors trash in once in awhile. That’s good enough. I’m busy and I need my weekends to recoup, rest, watch my sports, do chores around the house. Change the world? Not for me.
Doing-the-minimum Donavan: I’m fine with just going to school, doing my homework, hanging out with a couple of friends now and then. I don’t do bad things like a lot of other people my age. I go to church almost every week. I like my sleep and my video games. Why would I want to work harder? Changing the world sounds like a lot of work I don’t have to do.
Overworked-stressed-out Olivia: Kids, kids in school. Kids in sports. Kids who won’t sleep. I cook, clean, try to volunteer at church when I can, and I work part-time to help with bills. No way I have time to think past all the urchins who need me in my own house. Change the world? My little world is too much already.
This is a problem.
Because if Jeff, Donovan, Olivia and my neighbor girl really have accepted Jesus as their Savior, Shepherd, King and way to God through his death on the cross, are marked with the Holy Spirit for a future return because of his resurrection, and are now sons of Adam and daughters of Eve in God’s family—then they are citizens of God’s Kingdom, where he reigns and rules.
If they are citizens of God’s Kingdom, they’ve got a significant role to play in making sure it runs well…and expanding it.
As Jeremy Treat writes in the book Seek First (which I highly recommend), this Kingdom of God is “God’s reign through God’s people over God’s place.”
God could have populated and propagated the whole earth when he made it. But he didn’t. He wanted his people to do it—with the passion, creativity, and purpose he instilled inside of them.
I can imagine the Lord God chatting with Adam and Eve, sitting cross-legged on a big rock near a trickling waterfall, blue and green dragonflies flitting around, and maybe a few red, green and purple macaws cackling a hello from the tall palm trees waving in a light breeze.
They’re eating banana pancakes with a sprinkle of cinnamon and cashews and feeling complete peace. But I digress. (I grew up in the Philippines, so I’m dreaming of the tropical paradise which is the quaint, coastal Puerto Galara on Mindoro Island. And yes, we ate fresh-baked banana pancakes in a thatched roof nipa hut on the beach surrounded by palm trees and backed by mountains with countless waterfalls.)
So, imagine that kind of beauty that breeds deep inner harmony, hanging out with your best friend, while the Lord God says, “Look, I created this whole earth for you to enjoy. I’ll come down here and live with you, be with you. But I want you to do this yourselves, spread this good stuff of Eden all over the earth. I created you to work, to be fruitful, to multiply, to change the world into what you see here. I’ll encourage you, and of course the whole point is that we can enjoy each other's presence. But I’m not going to do it for you. It’s all yours!”
He wanted his glory, his goodness, his creation, his presence, his beauty, his will for love, joy, work, purpose, vegetation, animals, and people who are friends of God to spread to the rest of the earth. And he wanted Adam and Eve and their children to do it.
Many of us see the trajectory of our spiritually boring, me-centered, now-centered existence growing stale and tepid.
Or we watch the Jeffs, the Donovans or the Olivias dabble with mindless trivialities in their one, significant life. Our soul cries out, there’s GOT to be a better reason we’re here on this earth.
We’re all grasping for the truth that God made us uniquely…recognizing what we’ve been given…and secretly whispering to ourselves, lest others judge us as self-inflating, “How can I be one of those courageous world changers…those five or ten talent people (in Matthew 25) that multiplied what God gave them…you know, the ones who really make a BIG difference…like Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Melinda Gates, Amy Carmichael, Francis Chan, Condoleeza Rice, Cindy Anderson, Dallas Jenkins, K.C Rider, William Carey, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi and so many others like them?”
We’re not content with the answer, “Bring a meal to your neighbor. Give five dollars to the homeless man with a sign on the street. Don’t honk at the guy who’s cutting you off.”
No, we long to do MORE, to BE more as a citizen of the Most High God in the courts of his Kingdom. But often we don’t know how, and we’re not quite sure we’re the ones to do it. The first step is to embrace why God made us in the first place—to care for and expand his Kingdom on earth—and then we must ask ourselves why we’re still here. (Yes, stay tuned for part two called…Why We’re Still Here).
By the way, if you haven’t taken The Neighbors & Nations Course yet, you really should! You’ll learn all about how you can invite people into this Kingdom of God to expand its influence and change the world, lots of ways it’s REALLY good news for them, and how you can tell Bible stories in a natural way like I did with my neighbor girl, and feel confident doing it.
