Genesis 2:18-25
Jeremiah 31:3
Psalm 139:13

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been,
but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.” – Frederick Buechner

For some children, this question may hurt too much to ask. The answers don’t always fill us with a sense of belonging. Words like “mistake,” “accident” and “unplanned” hang over some lives. “You weren’t in the cards.” “We didn’t expect you.” “I didn’t ask for you. And now you are here.”

A young first-grade teacher, hoping to illustrate a point, once asked her students this question. The answers came quickly: “To take out the trash.”  “To help with chores.”  “My parents say tax credit and laugh whenever I ask them.”

Finally one child replied, “Because they loved me.”

Children, whether young or in mid-life, wake each morning without knowing that their life happened on purpose. They don’t realize fully that someone willed them into being. The unsophisticated truth, “I wanted you, that’s why you are here,” fades amid the tasks, the duties, and the justifications of earned worth and merited value.

A young couple recently mentioned their desire to have a child. They have a lovely marriage, many friends, and a great life for twenty-somethings. Yet they felt something was missing, something only another member of the family can provide. The love between them was not inadequate but the love stimulated the desire to procreate, the desire for something more.

The conviction of feeling wanted and being chosen specifically dramatically alters the way one sees life. The questions we wake up with differ. No longer do we ask, “Why am I here?” Rather, we ask, “How do I live my life, and what do I do with it?” A deep understanding of another’s love effects such change.

A few minutes’ conversation with any group of small children demonstrates this. Notice the ones who believe they’re loved and wanted by their parents, and then look at those who aren’t certain. The buoyancy and liveliness of the former forecast their lives.

Frederick Buechner mentions a sermon he once read. God awoke one day, looked around, and said, “I’m lonely, I think I’ll make me a world.” God then made man to be with him. Just as Adam’s world felt incomplete without Eve, so God felt his world incomplete without us. Not just the collective us, but every individual. Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15 speaks of each person’s inestimable worth: the shepherd would leave ninety-nine to search out the one.  He would leave them all, with all their needs and beckoning “baas” and come to find me.  He would leave the responsible sheep who stayed where they should, and come after me, the one who forgot, and wandered and got lost.

Still, having heard this, we still doubt that we matter. Though we hear it from parents, friends or spouses -- though Jesus would tell us -- we deny it. Thus, the work of God is, and ever will be, to believe. We must live like we believe we are wanted, knowing the world is incomplete without each of us.

Am I here on purpose or for a purpose?
Do I believe someone, God or my parents, wanted me to be here?
If I was created to be God’s friend, how does that affect my daily life?  What will I change about my thinking, attitudes, self-image, or priorities?