Hoverboards and Hope

Marty McFly traveled to a bright future full of hoverboards, pretty colors, and cool inventions. Even though his future wasn’t exactly what he was hoping for, it was still bright and hopeful as a whole. It’s indicative of older futuristic movies—the likes of which you really don’t see anymore.

But now the future is here and we all have computers in our pockets and cool inventions that make our lives easier, even though I don’t ride to work every day on a hoverboard (get on that, NASA). However, our media doesn’t reflect that. More recently, our movies and TV shows are generally about apocalypse, end times, zombie attacks, and mass death. It’s dark. It’s depressing. It’s hard to find the hope. People are cast off like dandelion seeds, and human life is disposable.

Last Christmas, one of my best friends made me a painting with a quote from the BBC show, Doctor Who, which said, “Nine hundred years of time and space and I never met anyone who was unimportant.”

It spoke to me. Everyone is important.

And recently I was watching an episode of the same show, when the Doctor was in a usual, desperate situation where he finds himself on a strange planet, with a bus full of people he was trying to save. He began to ask them where they were headed when they got on the bus. Some were headed to dinner, others to see friends and family, some just wanted to go home and watch TV. The Doctor told them, “That planet out there … that planet is nothing—you hear me? Nothing compared to all those things waiting for you: food, and home, and people. Hold on to that.”

This morning I was talking on the phone with my boyfriend as I got ready for work. He had been reading the Bible in the morning and he said he had been thinking about “the little people” in the Bible who are just part of a group and never get mentioned—the ones who marched around Jericho, or who wandered in the desert. He was talking about how we as people are always told that we can do great things, that we should strive to reach our potential…but what about these nameless people who were essentially the cogs of something bigger…but never had their names mentioned or made a big difference on their own.

I’ve been thinking about that this morning, and it makes me think of those Doctor Who quotes. There isn’t anyone who isn’t important. Every person makes a difference, even if it’s small. Even if it just means your life is composed of going to your boring day job and coming home to your loved ones at night.

We are all part of a bigger picture, and together we make a difference—even when we don’t think that we are. When we are living our lives, doing what God intended for us to do, we’re doing the greatest thing we can, even if we aren’t curing cancer or saving someone’s life.

Life happens in the little things. Life is made in the tiny decisions. Our lives matter, even in the great scheme of things and the vast cosmos that we know so little about. We matter. I matter.

YOU matter.