Your Life Is Worthwhile

Story time.

Earlier this year I put out a prayer request for a thing that was purely for fun. Because I like to have fun. That was the sole stated reason. Any side benefits could be had some other way. Why pretend at nobler motivations?

Fact check: Prayer answered.

Double fact check: Prayer over-answered. After I got home from doing the fun thing I had in mind, my child called me up and invited me to join her on a work trip. Except, it wasn’t visiting a chicken factory in the sticks (her usual type of work trip), it was to an epic destination that I had no idea was even possible, and instead, plane tickets were massively on sale.

Triple fact check: I avoid planes, crowds, all that, because I get sick easily and take a long time to recover. I wear an N95 to Sunday Mass because Catholics will turn out hacking up a lung, and I don’t need weekly bouts of that.

Quadruple fact check: I don’t even like wearing a mask. But I’ve lost so many months over the past few years to the easily-sick-interminable-recovery thing that I do it when I can’t rationalize excuses otherwise.

So. I’m going on this trip.

And thing is, it will require not just (a) avoiding getting sick in the next couple weeks, which means not doing some of the exact same fun I specifically asked for in that prayer request, and (b) living in an N95 for absurdly long stretches of time, but also, when I get to our destination, I’m going to be limited on how much I can do.

Literally the thing that makes this trip workable is that my daughter has to work. Which means I can sleep (or rest, or write) as needed in the apartment while she’s working, and do a small amount of very fun things with her during her free time.

==> Something I’ve learned over the past several months of experimenting is that travel and exercise go the best if I do it on my own. Just being able to sit down right now and take a quick break, for as long or short as I need, vastly extends my overall range.

Likewise not talking to people vastly increases my endurance for whatever it is we’re doing while talking.

I like talking to people! And yet silence buys me physical time. Obviously if the goal is to talk, then talking is the thing that needs to happen. But if the goal is accomplish some other physical task, then doing it alone makes it exponentially easier for me.

So:

I’m headed on this trip where I will do things like sleep in an apartment, and cook at home rather than eating out very much in what is a major restaurant town, and generally not do as much as normal people manage to squeeze in when they travel.
I’m only going because my kid asked me and I’m thrilled to spend the time with her, and yet the limited time we will actually spend doing things together is a key reason this trip is viable.
In order to make it all happen, I have to vastly restrict myself in any number of ways that further whittle down my brushes with normal life.
It would be very, very easy to fall into the idea that this trip is “wasted” on me. Someone else would be able to see more, do more, interact more, go farther, and generally “get more out of” this adventure than I will be able to do.

(And note that this is only happening because I am actually doing, at this very moment, as well or better than I’ve been in the last couple years. Very thankful for that.)

Guys: Your life, however limited, is not a waste. You are worthwhile.

There’s no sacred threshold amount of being able to do things that divides “worthwhile” people from “what a waste” people. There are no waste-people.

I share this on a religion blog because we’re living in a time when there’s an increasing push to sort and cull. To say that these lives are worth living and these others are not. That some people aren’t worth caring for, it’s better for them to be dead.

You are worth caring for.

You have an inherent dignity and worth as a person made in the image of God. The experiences of life are not wasted on someone like you. They are for someone like you.

We have to fight for this reality both in the political realm and also in our everyday lives.

If this is an area where you have been struggling to: