YouTube has assisted us in our search for significance by giving us the opportunity to take a sip of fame, but has also made us aware that this thirst is digitally unquenchable. We make infectious home videos in the hope that they will go viral. We become so obsessed with our digital dear diary that we measure success by the number of hits and not by the quality of the punch. The problem is that we confuse purpose with popularity, and significance with shock-value. Sadly, we settle for getting punch drunk on video hits rather than soberly pursuing selfless service.

The problem with YouTube is it assumes that significance is a solo project and not a collaboration. I suspect that many of you have fond memories of someone who had a profound impact on your life. It may have been a friend, coach, or Sunday school teacher, but more than likely it was someone the rest of the world never knew. Someone whose life went unnoticed, unrewarded, and unappreciated, despite the fact that they had profoundly changed the world by serving others. We need to remember that God didn’t create us to be the stars of His Grand Drama, but rather indispensable members of His glorious supporting cast. In the end, our significance will be found in the quality of the scenes we shared with others and not in the way we tried to upstage them.

I encourage you to think about this as you cross paths with your fellow man today. What drama in their lives just intersected yours? What plot conflict just shared your life stage? Maybe if we were more sensitive to the image-bearing cues of our fellow thespians, we would be a better supporting cast for them when their lives turned from comedy to tragedy. God’s world should be characterized by the ensemble power of grand redemptive theater and not the selfish performance art of postmodern improvisation.

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. (1 John 3: 16-18)