On my vanishing sense of “importance”

And why losing our importance can be good for all of us

Henri Nouwen ()right) with a member of the L’Arche Daybreak community in Toronto.

When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. —Luke 14:8

My early intellectual development fostered a high level of ambition, which persisted after I became a Christian. In graduate school, as friends contemplated writing dissertations on prominent thinkers, I dreamed of the day when the quality and influence of my work would cause someone to think about writing a dissertation on me.

Forty years later, I don’t think anyone is ever going to write a dissertation on me.

I often struggle with a sense of professional failure, compounded by anguish over some of my career decisions. Whenever someone says, “No one on their deathbed ever wished they had spent more time at the office,” I respond that I am an outlier.

My current career status reinforces that unease. Although many readers express appreciation for my writing and editing, I’d have trouble finding a decent-paying job if I needed one.

When I’m complaining that my career hasn’t been what it should have been or that I’m not the world’s best-known Christian writer, my thoughts often turn to Henri Nouwen, the Dutch Catholic priest and prolific writer on matters of spirituality. Nouwen was much more prominent than me; he taught at Yale and Harvard and wrote 40 books. But he spent the last 10 years of his life as pastor of a community for people with disabilities, L’Arche Daybreak, in Toronto. I doubt he would have described that time as less important.

Many other Christians seem vulnerable to a worldly understanding of what’s important. In their pursuit of bigger numbers or visibility, they often neglect those people who seem to have little influence. The threat of this misguided behavior is reflected in James’s warnings not to neglect the poor (Galatians 2:10; James 2:1–4).

Elijah, Elisha, and Jesus had memorable encounters with large numbers of people and/or with political leaders, but they all took time to minister to “insignificant” individuals too.

Over 50 years ago, two social psychologists asked seminary students to prepare a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. As each seminarian walked to the location, a slumped man, moaning in distress, lay in their path. Most of the seminarians—including 90 percent of those who were told they needed to hurry to the location—walked by without stopping. They ignored a suffering man because they needed to deliver a message about helping the Good Samaritan!

One of the most theologically instructive song verses I’ve heard recently is this one from “Simple Kingdom” by Bryan and Katie Torwalt and Cody Carnes:

Your Kingdom is backwards, it flows in reverse.
What You call a treasure this world calls a curse.
The small become great and the last become first.
Your Kingdom is backwards; Lord, teach us to serve.

Now, let us all go and do something important.