The gift of significance

I am a professional listener.  Clients pay me to not to simply hear words of presenters, but to find the essence, the core of what they say, and capture it visually.

This morning, at 8:18, I am at my board, marker moving, mind in gear, plucking phrases out of thin air like a magician materializing shiny coins.  And I am realizing – behind the adrenaline-fed, controlled panic that is my professional life – that I am finding more and more a deeper purpose to what I do. 

I am honoring people by celebrating their words.

Proverbs 25:11 says that “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.” In a way, I am the jeweler, crafting the settings that show off the beauty of fitly spoken words.

Not that most of what I hear is all that fit.  At least, to me.  At the moment, I am happily drawing this techie who doesn’t know how to translate his world into normal speech.  Little does the speaker who references this know how much it describes my life.

But that’s what it means to serve others.  It doesn’t matter what I find interesting.  I’m to give a sense of importance and permanence to someone else’s world by visually celebrating their words.  However indecipherable they may be to me.

We all long for permanence.  I think of this later as I pass under a row of thickly branched trees on a block of downtown San Francisco.  I wonder at their ability to thrive in a concrete environment.  We live in a similarly unforgiving world – one which mocks our trivial lifespans and our attempts to make a lasting impact.

That significance, that permanence, only comes from being reconnected to our Creator.  He, alone, opens the door to eternity, which he intended for us from the start.  I am learning that as his emissary, in a very small way, I can show how much we matter to him.  We were never meant to be forgotten.

And remembering someone’s words is a reminder.

Lord, you do desire eternity for us.  Thank you for giving us ways to remind each other of this.  Help us all to honor and celebrate each other – and speak against the lie of this world that mocks permanence.  In some small way today, help me to give the gift of significance to someone.