March 12, 2026
The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living noted five characteristics of people who lived relatively well-adjusted. And they dovetail with Christianity quite nicely. The fourth of the characteristics is Higher Meaning. Higher Meaning is interpreting your experiences in such a way that they become an asset. Grieving can make you a compassionate facilitator for a grief group. War experiences can make you an effective listener to someone suffering PTSD. Recovering from a knee replacement helps you be able to encourage someone facing a knee replacement. You get the idea. Our experiences, good and bad: we can give them higher meaning if we use them to be an asset to others.
Let Us Pray: Father in Heaven, makes us useful to Your purposes. May our experiences make us compassionate servants of each other. In Jesus’s Name, Amen.