God’s Coworker

Almost 20 years ago, in the summer of 2000, I was falling in love with a beautiful freshman. Karie and I met at college and started dating at the end of her first year. Her brother was coming up from Raleigh to Indiana for a week that summer. So conveniently she got a ride with him and visited me.

 But I still vividly remember many details from that visit. For some reason, one of the 1st videos we watched with my brothers—I think one of them borrowed it from the library—was called Antz. It’s an animation about a neurotic worker ant who spends the entire movie trying to win the affection of this princess ant.

What was interesting, is at the end of the movie, the camera pans out, you realize this entire compelling story, all the action & drama, took place in an ant hill, on a little patch of grass in Central Park. As it continues to zoom out, you realize Central Park is just a little dot of grass in the heart of NYC.

You see the comparison between the ants working, scurrying around frenetically, and the people in NYC, doing the same thing.

 See if you wore a GoPro camera for several weeks, documenting your life, your classes, grinding out your day-to-day responsibilities. You can get so focused on the job in front of us, like little ants.

 But do you ever zoom out? What if you took the camera and put it on a drone, and let it go up in the air— until your campus or your house or your workplace looks small and insignificant compared to all of Greenville, or all of the Upstate. Or go to Google Maps satellite view and look at the whole country, then the whole globe. And maybe we keep zooming out until Planet Earth is just a speck of dust in the Milky Way.

Do you ever look at the bigger picture? And ask yourself, “Why do I do what I’m doing down here? Why do I work? What’s the meaning of my work?”