Do Everything.

It could be studying. Working in a finance company. Cooking for a family.

Suddenly a picture of a sinewy child from a magazine catches your eye, you see a crying woman holding a dead baby in a wartorn country on the television, or you hear about a missionary living her life in a poverty-stricken zone to care for dying children.

Times like these, you question what you do and feel lost, defeated even.

Significance. It’s the God-substance we’re all looking for to fill the hole in our lives.

To be honest, the day I returned back to work from my mission trip to Myanmar, I felt absolutely lost. Swamped with work and a heavier patient load, I wondered what it was that I was doing with my life- reading research papers, attending intellectual medical talks, seeing patient after patient after patient… wearing a nametag with the pre-fix “Doctor” going about my 80-hour workweeks everyday… and basically doing a job that could easily be filled by someone else.

… when somewhere, sometime in another part of the world, a child is needing to be held, a mouth is eager to be fed, a heart is longing to hear a fragment of Good News. But here I am, going by yet another normal day at work, wondering what I am working for, to whose life am I really making a difference to. After all, being a junior doctor often involves a lot of paperwork and running of errands (there is so much running of errands for patient after patient) and can leave hardly any time or space or allowance for holding somebody’s hand, or saying kind words of comfort.

Maybe you feel the same? You ask yourself, to whose life have you made a difference to.

Perhaps you are torn and guilt-ridden, feeling defeated by your mundane life, and yet, too scared to step out of your world into Africa or some forsaken land to lend a hand to the hungry and the needy. You may, like me, from time to time, feel ashamed of… your life itself.

Day in day out, I’m at the hospital, sometimes wondering if this doctoring business was really what I had imagined it to be. Saving lives? Touching hearts? Why, as a junior doctor, all I do is a lot of paperwork and running around for patients, but very little time really is spent putting my hand around a patient’s shoulder, finding out how things are at home, asking him what his favorite hobby is.

Do you wonder if your life is significant, too? Do you wish you were making more of a difference to the world?

Because I know how it feels. That day I returned from Myanmar, I wept. I wanted to be back in the mission field, holding a child without parents, living with them and sharing their lives with them. I wanted to be back in that run-down church building teaching Sunday school stories to the poor children, I wanted to buy food for the hungry kids who had an egg once a week or less, I wanted to be back in the field holding them, being there for them, to tell them that they mattered and no, they were not forgotten.

But I am here, serving my 6-year bond to the government for my medical education, trying to get a traineeship for my specialty of choice, trying to be useful in the community I’ve been placed in.

And then I heard this song today, Do Everything, and was reminded of how precious what we do on an everyday basis is to God, how important that is in our training of character, how our attitude of excellence and love really should be consistent in our everyday lives in everything that we do.

Going to the village orphanage to serve the kids a hot meal of rice, meats and veggies- a rare treat!