The Sacredness of Insignificance

Tomorrow I turn fifty.

It’s not a milestone I’ve dreaded, though I’ve certainly felt its weight approaching. But it’s not the weight of regret. It’s the weight of awareness—of having carried things, for a long time, that were never mine to hold. Of having mistaken anxiety for purpose. Of thinking I had to make something of myself, when perhaps what mattered all along was learning how to be unmade, and remade, in love.

If I could write a letter to my twenty-five-year-old self, I’d tell him a few things that might sound like heresy to the spiritual striving he was doing back then.

First: You are not the point.

That will sting. I know. You’ve been taught to think of your life as a divine project. To discern God’s will for you. To find the right path, the right theology, the right spouse, the right cause. You’ve been taught to treat yourself like a problem to be solved, or worse, a brand to be curated. Even your prayers are mostly about your own journey: your growth, your calling, your peace.

But here’s what you’ll come to see: you are not the centre of the story. You never were. And that’s the best news in the world.

Because if your life is not the main plot, then your failures don’t derail it. Your suffering doesn’t disprove it. The weight of cosmic meaning doesn’t rest on your shoulders. You’re not being tested for the next life or graded on your spiritual performance. You are a thread in a tapestry far vaster than you can imagine—and no thread, not even the broken ones, are without purpose.

I wish I had understood this when I was younger: that the gospel was never about rescuing me. It was about rescuing us. It is not a private salvation plan, nor a spiritual evacuation strategy. It’s a revelation of how the whole cosmos is being re-formed through love. Not individualised love—selective, preferential, romanticised—but the kind that lays itself down, again and again, to remake the world from the inside out.

We don’t want that, of course. Not really. We want a God who will intervene in our personal struggles and vindicate our private virtue. We want magic tricks, not transformation. We want to matter. And we do—but not in the way we think.

Because here’s another thing I’ve come to understand: nothing matters unless everything matters. The plan of salvation means nothing if it is not for the whole creation. Not just people. Everything. Molecules and mountains and memory. Every sparrow, every nebula. Every scapegoated soul and silenced cry. If redemption doesn’t reach all the way down into every fracture and every species, every cosmos and every history, then it’s just a selective favouritism with better PR.

This is the quiet revolution the gospels offer. Not a religion. Not a rescue mission for individuals. A cosmic reweaving. And Jesus—wounded, risen, refusing revenge—is the glimpse we’re given of how that tapestry will look when it’s finished. A pattern where no pain is wasted. No death is final. No outsider left outside.

Of course, we don’t live in the end of the story. We live inside time. We experience the unravelling, not the weaving. And when you are young, especially, you mistake your thread for the whole pattern. You believe your pain is the end of the world. And in a way, it is. Because you haven’t yet seen how pain can be transfigured. You haven’t yet seen how small you are—and how that smallness is sacred.

There’s a paradox I never would have accepted at twenty-five: that peace comes when you finally stop trying to be special. Not because you’re not beloved, but because everyone is. Your uniqueness doesn’t need to be proved. It is not under threat. You were not made to stand out, but to belong. To be part of the great web of all that is—breathing, aching, becoming.

And maybe, above all, I’d tell that younger me that maturity is not about achievement or certainty or significance. It’s about relatedness. To learn to be with, not over or against. To choose presence over performance. To trade being right for being kind. To see your enemies as broken siblings. To let your wounds open you up, not shut you down.

That’s the work of a lifetime.

And I am, finally, grateful for mine.