Articles are interesting little things. An article,
grammatically speaking, is a word used to modify a noun. They’re similar
to an adjective, although an adjective is generally more descriptive, whereas
an article is used to point out a noun. They’re rather bland as far as
words go. In this regard, adjectives
completely dominate. And being rather
bland, they often fade into the background for me. “I went to the store.” The.
A. An. Boring! Boring,
perhaps, but not altogether insignificant.
Take, for instance, the familiar phrase “to make a
difference”. I both love and detest this phrase. Certainly it evokes a prompting of sorts, a
desire to be a part of something big and amazing. But that a in there… It
causes me pain. A difference. That seems so ambiguous, and it seems
to carry with it an unspoken mandate to make such a difference large and
meaningful and important. To bring about such a feat, the doer of the
deed must therefore be meaningful and important. And to be quite honest, most days I feel much
more like a baby chicken than a soaring eagle. Let’s just be honest: not even a baby chicken. They’re cute and fuzzy and cuddly and elicit
adoration from onlookers. I feel like
just a regular chicken, pecking my fool head off to try to find whatever it is
I’m supposed to be looking for, every now and again flapping my silly little
wings when I get an inflated sense of self and think of myself as something
more than a flightless, ground pecking non-eagle. My focus immediately shifts
to what I’m not, and that nagging voice inside my head incessantly yaps to me
of my failures, real and perceived, and paralysis sets in, and I once more do
absolutely nothing to yield any sort of difference.
I wonder, though, what if we were to simply change the
article in that phrase? What if, rather than attempting to make a
difference, we instead attempted to make the difference? To say that
someone has made a difference, their status immediately elevates, and we view
them as some sort of super human whose level of significance we will never
attain. To make a difference is to be important, to be significant, to
matter. To know this of ourselves- that we’re on this planet for more
than decoration- is a longing every member of the human race has in common.
We want to be important; we want to matter. What I believe we fail to understand, though,
is that our “mattering” is intrinsically woven into the very strands of our
souls. We matter because of who we are, not what we do. The “what” is supposed to merely be a natural
output of the “who.” But for so many of
us, the significance of who we are has been lost. Sadly, for some
people, never have they experienced the truth of their worth. To make a difference is to be important; to
make the difference is to change the nature of something. I have no doubt
that some of us were born to do things that all would esteem as significant and
amazing and incredibly noble. I wonder, though, if some of those world
changers are holding those differences as merely untapped potential, unseen
potential, because there are those who, would they embrace the truth that their
significance is intrinsic, that the value of the difference they make doesn’t
get to be defined by anyone else but that it’s value is beyond all worth
nonetheless, would make the difference in the life or lives of those whose
worth is hidden from them and change the very nature of a soul. Sounds
pretty noble to me.
