Devotional from Pastor Dave February 7, 2024

I must confess that I haven’t watched the Grammy musical awards ceremony for a number of years. I feel like I don’t really know the popular artists or their songs well enough these days. But apparently this past Sunday’s Grammys threw a few bones to older dogs like me.

Billy Joel performed his first new single in several years. Joni Mitchell, at age 80, performed her song “Both Sides, Now” from decades ago. And Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs combined for her hit from my college days in the ‘90s which he has covered on the country charts this past year, “Fast Car.” It was very inspiring to see a Black woman and a White man together on stage singing a song that is all about feeling a sense of belonging and being someone.

But what really captured my attention was the song of the year, “What Was I Made For” by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas. It’s one of the songs featured in the Barbie movie from last summer. Just like the movie is an entertaining existential exploration of the quintessential American doll’s meaning and purpose, so too is this song, which imagines Barbie waking up to her loss of innocence and her realization of her unreal life as an inanimate commodity. It’s a

simple, meditative song, sung in a plaintive whisper over a piano line. Four times in the song, the question is raised, “what was I made for?”

Perhaps it won song of the year because it raises a question that comes to all our hearts and minds at least at some point in our lives, and maybe even throughout our lives. Who among us doesn’t wonder what our purpose in this life is, what we were made for, what we are here for?

Thankfully, our faith provides us some answers to this most essential question. The very first command of God in Genesis 1 directs us to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (1:28). There’s lot of ways to be fruitful and to reflect the creativity of our Creator in our own creativity.

The Westminster Catechism, which comes to us out of the Reformed tradition, claims that our chief purpose is to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” That’s pretty good, too. That resonates with the scriptures, particularly Psalm 145.

But I keep coming back around to what Jesus said was the most important thing in life, the greatest commandment—to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:34-40, Mark 12:28-34, Luke 10:25-28). Our bishop reminded us of this a couple of weeks ago.

How exactly each of us will live this out, of course, will be different for every one of us, so we still have to sort out our unique set of gifts and interests and abilities as we discern our particular purposes in this world. But it all comes back to love. Of both God and neighbor. Ultimately, isn’t that what we are made for?