“Love brings everyone home.”
Laura Lane from ‘I Touch the Heavens’
Tracy Chapman in her 1988 hit song Fast Car sang “I had a feeling I could be someone.” When I listened to that song on the radio today, I thought about how that desire to ‘be someone’ is such a relatable human desire.
Only in today’s world, over 35 years later, ‘being someone’ is more than just being a politician, leader, an athlete, a superstar, or having 15 minutes of fame or infamy in the news. Today, the world wants to have 10 million followers on Tiktok, Youtube or have a video go viral with 100 million views.
But what should we really be doing to ‘be someone’? Whose attention should we really be going after?
Jesus told a parable about a shepherd who has 100 sheep and one little sheep goes missing. He leaves the 99 sheep to go searching high and low for the one lost sheep. Many times the parable is directed at our efforts to search for those who are lost to the gospel, to remind us when we are lost that Jesus searches after us.
But what if we applied that sentiment in the parable to our search to ‘be someone’ in the world. What if instead of seeking the attention of 100 million people we simply sought to make the difference in one person’s life?
Who is the one person in your life who needs you right now? What do they need from you that would make their day? What would save them from dangerous paths and thorny grounds? What would lift their spirits and bring them a little comfort and joy?
What if that became the focus of our day, each day, to find one person to lift up and make their life brighter, easier, happier?
If you found a new person to help each day for 70 years that would be over 25,000 people.
And if you dedicated your life to helping, watching over and keeping safe just one or two special people in your life that would still make you a very good shepherd as well. You would have become someone very special indeed to them.
I hope that when you reflect on your life so far you will see that you have already become someone, someone very important, to those you love and care for.
“What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?”
Luke 15:4 KJV