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    It was an old, dinky, dying town on the way to nowhere. Imagine my surprise when I saw an expensive sign proudly pointing the way to the county museum. I joked about pulling off to see this county museum to my own kids. We got several good laughs making jokes about all the non-events the museum in this nowhere place detailed. Then a wave of conviction swept over me.

    Yeah, this was a small little town in an unknown county in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, no earth shattering global events had transpired here. But people had lived out their stories here for hundreds of years. They had lived and died and raised families here. Some had done remarkable acts of heroism in the everyday and ordinary problems of life. Some were wickedly evil and others genuinely nice. Since all these lives were lived far from the beaten path, few outside this little dusty county would ever know about these events. But their deeds, their lives, their sacrifices were important to their families and to each other. Most importantly, each of these lives was significant to God.

No one is unimportant to God

    We have a way of glorifying the lives of the people we find in the Bible and making them seem almost superhuman. But the Bible is about ordinary people who lived in a land area about the size of the county where this museum was found. These “Bible people” would have been absolutely unknown except for the fact that God’s grace swept them up into his history of salvation. As one old friend put, “There’s nothing special about Bible characters, they were just a bunch of characters alive when the Bible was written down.” He’s right if you add a dab of faith and a willingness to be used by God on their part.

    You see, no one is unimportant to God—not you, not me, not the folks in this little county in the middle of nowhere. We are all part of His story, and we matter. He knows the number of the hairs on our head. He cares about our hopes and dreams. He wants us to spend eternity with him in heaven. Each journey of faith is significant to him. He has known us since conception and longs to share his life with us for eternity. So in a way, each county could have a museum. Even if no one visited, the museum would be important because the One that matters most noticed what happened in that place!