Designed to See What Others Cannot

The James Webb Space Telescope took over twenty years and ten billion dollars to build. Its eighteen gold-coated mirror segments were each polished to a smoothness measured in nanometers. Its sunshield unfolds to the size of a tennis court. Every gram of material, every angle of every mirror, was engineered for a single, breathtaking purpose: to capture infrared light from the earliest galaxies in the universe — light that had been traveling for more than thirteen billion years.

What strikes me is this: no one asked the Webb Telescope to also forecast the weather. No one expected it to stream movies or manage air traffic. It was designed for one magnificent purpose, and everything about its construction reflected that calling.

Paul wrote, "For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do" (Ephesians 2:10). The Greek word for handiwork is poiema — we get our word "poem" from it. You are not an accident. You are not generic hardware. The Almighty crafted you with the same intentionality those engineers poured into Webb — except infinitely more.

When you wonder whether your life has purpose, remember: God did not design you to do everything. He designed you to do something only you can do, something He prepared before you ever drew breath. Your job is not to become someone else's telescope. Your job is to point toward the light you were built to see.