What Gives You Significance

Boise State won the Fiesta Bowl this year!

Because our Son, Jon, and his Family lived in Boise for several years I called to congratulate him. I was completely surprised to hear him say he wanted the other Team, TCU, to win.

His explanation made sense. “The people of Boise live vicariously through that Team.” He’d lived there long enough to have the right to make such an assessment. But what did he mean by it? “They’ve found their identity and significance in their University’s winning Football Team.” His next statement really got my attention. “I like the line, ‘I live vicariously through myself.’”

This is our Son speaking. He’s a devout Christ-follower. Now, here he is sounding like Frank Sinatra. “I did it my way!”

But is that what he really meant?

The more I think about it the more I realize he could have meant something much more profound.

To live vicariously is to experience or realize something through imaginative or sympathetic participation in the experience of another. The people of Boise, our Son was suggesting, found a sense of worth in their “Broncos.”

Truthfully, we who are serious Christ-followers actually realize something similar through actual participation in the experience of another. In a very real sense we find our significance vicariously.

Psalm 139 is one I read often. In this “song” – that’s what most Psalms are – King David is overwhelmed with the realization of how attentive and caring God is toward him. “Such knowledge,” he writes, “is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence!” It’s not as if he wanted to escape God’s presence. He is simply amazed at the magnitude of His interest; His concern for every detail of someone’s life. He is so amazed that he can’t stop talking about it. “You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand! And when I wake up, you are still with me!” (Psalm 139: 13 – 18 New Living Translation)

David is talking here about something that is, by his own admission, “too great for (him) to understand.” It is, without question, the experience of another. And yet he is singing about it as if it were his own reality. And it is. David is finding ecstasy in the attentive, creative beneficence of his God. He has been made “wonderfully complex.” God did that. His development, from conception to birth was managed by the Creator of all things great and small. God thinks “about me,” he exclaims, thoughts that “cannot be numbered.” He lives under the infinite wisdom and intricately discerning oversight of the same being who scatters the stars and galaxies across the heavens and designs the path determined for every one of them.

David finds great significance in knowing this! He knows he’s somebody because he knows whose he is. He is living vicariously through himself. We can too.

Look at it this way.

Realizing how highly God values me
I live,
in step with His purpose,
confidently,
courageously,
enthusiastically,
expectantly …

Our true selves are fully realized as we experience this esteem in which our Creator/God holds us. This is, in fact, what Jon meant when he said, “I live vicariously through myself.”

We, Christ-followers are “Vicarious Selves.”