The single biggest marker of the the right side up way of living life is this:

People and Relationships are the Most Important.

If you remember from the last post, the first marker in the Kingdom of People is “Stuff is the Most Important.” Possessions, money and whoever dies with most toys wins.¹ Maybe that sounds a little cliche, but doesn’t our culture consider the ones with the most stuff the most successful?

The ones who have made it are the athletes, actors, musicians, entertainers, business owners, politicians, professors, doctors, lawyers. And we rank their level of success by how many zeros are between the leading one and the decimal point. If you don’t have enough of those zeros, then you’re just small time.²

But, if you’re an enlightened millennial or post-millennial³ then you’ve rejected the bourgeoisie and all it’s trappings and have moved beyond the game of accumulating stuff and embraced minimalism. That’s awesome! So did I. For the first 30 years of my life, I could fit all of my possessions in a backpack.

But I was still flying upside down and was still in the mode of accumulating things – but instead of money, I accumulated experiences.

I joined Youth With A Mission and spent three years traveling the world racking up my score on countries visited and cultures experienced. I clothed it in some Christianese language, but ultimately it was about me.⁴ I was putting notches in my belt.

But in the Kingdom of God, people and relationships are the most important – especially those who are on the fringes, on the outside looking in. And it was in the midst of my exercise in experience accumulation I was first introduced to this way of living.

There was a guy named John Morton who decided to become my friend. I was one of the people on the fringes – I was an introvert and social awkward and arrogant and… well anyway. John saw me on the outside and came after me. Intentionally. He actually told me this several years later because I wasn’t smart enough to connect the dots. It blew me away.

But, of course the Kingdom of God would value relationships above everything else. If God spoke everything into existence, if he made everything on a whim, then he has absolutely no need for stuff. Value comes from scarcity – the less there is of something that is desirable, the more value it has. So, what would a God that can create anything see as scarce?

Relationships.

It’s a startling realization that the God who spoke a universe into existance⁵ might see something as scarce, but it’s true. At the risk of being cliche (again), there’s exactly one of you. And he desperately wants a relationship with you.

The truly scarce thing in the entire universe are people. There’s only one of each other person around. And this first most important marker of the Kingdom of God flips the very purpose of our existence right side up. We don’t exist to accumulate stuff. We exist to accumulate relationships – and, specifically, to accumulate one particular relationship: the one with our Creator.

Photo credit: Photo by Thiago Barletta on Unsplash