vanity.

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

- Emily Dickinson-

My high school English class would probably cringe at the sight of that name and face. None of us were fans of this hermit-gone-poet (or perhaps, poet-gone-hermit?). Please see Matt Dorado for further discussion - he is very passionate about this topic.

Despite all that, this little poem of hers captivated me. She seems to express so uniquely, the very thing I've come to grasp in the past few years: if we live for something other and greater than ourselves, our life is not lived in vain.

There is a story being woven across all of human history.

It's the story of the entire universe. It's made up of millions of little stories. It's bigger than we can fathom, and its Author is more grand and magnificent than anything of which we ourselves can even attempt to conceive.

And because of that, our own story is insignificant. Minute. Miniscule. Negligible. Replaceable. Disposable.

We won't even come close to mattering until we put our story in that story.

We become significant only in becoming a part of something else.

But by that time, we ourselves are no longer significant. By that time, it's not even about "mattering." By that time, it's not about us, for we have been lost in Something (or Someone) else.

As John Piper put it, "We weren't created to be somebody, we were created to know Somebody."

When we live for Something greater than ourselves, we end up trading our very small "something" for a very large (and I'll even venture to say, infinite) "Something." In the end, everything we were and everything we were about pales in comparison to that of which we are now a part, to the One we now know.

And that's why it's not vanity:

Because it's no longer about us.