Needles on the Christmas Tree

Have you ever wondered if your life matters? Does it make a difference? Does it count for anything?

Have you ever wondered if your life matters?

Does it make a difference? Does it count for anything?

Many of us have wondered about these things. We wonder if our small lives add up to anything worth something.

I’ll never forget reading the account of Lewis and Clark’s explorations of America. In my early 20s, I felt small in light of their grand adventure. These folks had done something. Just then, I came upon the words Meriwether Lewis scribbled in his journal on his 30th birthday. On the ridge of the great unknown West of the American continent, he secretly feared that his life did not matter.

I thought about this feeling this last week, as I walked through the cold and wondrous streets of Oxford, England. I felt several feelings. I was awed by the ancient spires, walking the footsteps of another Lewis, known to his friends as Jack and to us as C.S. He, C.S. Lewis, taught at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, forming friendships with several colleagues. Several of them convinced the atheistic Lewis that God was real, that Christianity was true.

Lewis wrestled with these claims on a walking path inside the grounds of Magdalen College, named for another, earlier famous former professor called “Addison.” As I stepped into the dark dirt pathway of Addison’s Walk, I wondered about the giants who had walked it before me.

Specifically, Lewis and his friend who most convinced him of the truth of the faith: J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien authored the masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. Yet he also wondered the same question: Does my life matter? Does anything I do matter? What if I never accomplish the grand goals I have with this one little life that God has gifted to me.

Tolkien wrote a story about how our lives matter, about a man named Niggle who tried to paint a masterpiece but only managed a single leaf. I wonder if Tolkien named the character for the feeling of “niggling”— which describes a persistent source of discomfort or anxiety. Niggle wondered if his work mattered. Did that little painting of a leaf matter? Tolkien wondered, too. Did the land of Middle Earth matter? Would he ever finish the story?

Maybe you feel insignificant, like a single, disposable leaf on a tree. Or more festively: like a single needle on a Christmas tree. Your existence matters no more or less than a grain of green that falls to the floor.

I get the feeling. We all get it, if we have ever wondered beyond the daily grinding of to-dos and the numbing of screens.

If life is only atoms colliding in mirco-space, we have no reason to hope. If Christmas is a fairy tale made up by religious opportunists, we don’t matter and neither does anything we do.

But if story of the gospel and the Bible is true, then we do matter and our doings matter.

In all of that, you do matter, and what you do matters.

The wrong way to think: it’s about me

Any time we focus on the value of humanity and our own lives we risk forgetting the central reality of the Bible and the world: God is.

“In the beginning, God created…” (Gen 1:1). This assumes that before creation became, God is, and was, and will be.

Before anything else became, God is I Am. He precedes and transcends all other reality. “He made known his ways to Moses, and his act to the people of Israel” (Ps 103:6), and he first revealed his name to Moses: I Am Who I Am.

Then Moses asked God, “If I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what should I tell them?” God replied to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:13–14).

In one sense, in the scope of God’s “God-ness,” nothing else matters. Like Kenny Wayne Shepherd sings, it’s all “blue on black, tears on a river, push on a shove, it don't mean much, joker on jack, match on a fire, cold on ice, a dead man’s touch…whisper on a scream doesn’t change a thing…”

Turn on your iPhone camera on a sunny day. It’s irrelevant.

In light of God, we’re irrelevant and insignificant.

Except that God makes us significant. God makes us matter, because he made matter. God instilled creation with value because he is the one who made it.

In Oxford I visited all sorts of places connected to famous and brilliant people. Maybe most importantly (for me), I found places connected to The Inklings. The writers group of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and others, where classics like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings were workshopped. The artifacts of these authors make them significant.

Much more, the world displays the glory of God. “The world is charged by the grandeur of God.”

These lines of poetry were written by 19th-century Oxford poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In Oxford, I was walking back to my room at Somerville College, past a beautiful Catholic Church. I noticed a plaque, “Where Gerard Manley Hopkins was priest and J.R.R. Tolkien worshipped.” Of course, I had to go in. This place mattered to me because of the connection to these men.

God made matter, so therefore matter matters. God created things, so they matter. They’re valuable because of their Creator.

Even more, the crowning glory of creation is the human race. Of all the creation, only humanity is created in the very image of God.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image;
he created him in the image of God;
he created them male and female.
God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth”
(Genesis 1:26–28).

We matter because God matters, and God made us in his own image. We are valuable because of God whose image stamped on us. We are the self-portrait of God the Master Artist in the world.

Vincent van Gogh was one of the most important artists in history. He produced dozens of self-portraits, more than any other painter in history after Rembrandt. About ten years ago one of van Gogh’s portraits almost went up for sale by the city of Detroit. It was valued at over $100 million dollars, and would be worth “considerably more” today.

How much more valuable are those hand-crafted by the Master as bearers of his own image?

So we have to navigate this tension, because we are valuable, but only because God is valuable and has made us valuable.

The right way to think: I’m a needle in the Tree

In creation we are a part of a tapestry of God’s creative glory. But of course, creation was corrupted and condemned by rebellion. The image of God was marred but not destroyed. Imagine someone looking at a portrait of van Gogh and throwing their cup of coffee against it. That would be a travesty, and it would harm the painting. Sin does this. It harms the image-bearers of God (and we have spilled the coffee ourselves and gotten burned).

The gospel is God’s restoration project for his human self-portraits. He painstakingly scrubs the stains out of our souls with the only solvent that can remove the stain but not destroy the original: the blood of Jesus.

God the Father sent God the Son to become a human being in the womb of Mary. Christ was God the Son, in human flesh and bone and heart. He grew as a baby, then a boy, then a man. He never sinned, so he could stand in our place for our sins, because the paycheck for the work of sin is death. When we turn from our sin (repent) and trust in him (believe), we are forgiven and given eternal life.

The entire reality of this salvation and new life, of God’s restoration project, is called “union with Christ.” We are connected to Jesus. Identified with Jesus. Tapped into Jesus. Plugged into Jesus. Hard-wired into Jesus.

We become a needle in the true tree of Christ.

Remain in me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. 5 I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me (John 15:4–5).

We matter because God made us. And we matter because God saved us, united us into Christ. We matter, because the Tree matters.

Think of it this way. In the garden, God planted trees. He planted a tree of life and a tree of knowledge. He told the first man, Adam, that he could eat from the tree of life but he couldn’t eat from the tree of knowledge. Adam, tempted by the snake, disobeyed God. He died spiritually under the tree.

The cross is sometimes called “the tree.” On the tree, Christ dies like Adam, but as a Second Adam.

If you’ve ever had a real Christmas tree, you know it starts to dry out, eventually all the needles shed. It becomes a fire hazard. You leave it by the road or take it to the park where they mulch it into pulp.

Adam killed the tree, and then Christ died on the tree, but he died as a seed, and was planted into the earth in burial. On the third day, he rose from the dead, and the tree erupted fully alive and full again.

Ever leaf (if you’re thinking of an oak tree) or every needle (if you’re thinking of a Christmas pine tree) has a name on it.

Your name.

No needle matters more than another. Even if someone seems to our view to be like an entire branch, they matter only because of the tree.

But they do matter, and their doings matter, because of the tree.

Niggle found that it did matter. After died he found a real tree in heaven—and it had his leaf on it.

In Christ, you matter.

Your doings matter.

So do something. Even if it’s small, it matters.