Shadowgraphs is a column written from a progressive Christian perspective, based on a concept for an essay from Kierkegaard's work Either/Or.

When I was sixteen years old I took a bus home from work, here in Eau Claire. The ride was a long one, an hour altogether, for I lived in the north side of town. I worked, ate, waited for a bus in the cold, and got home late just to wake up early and repeat the process. Like many of life's lessons, the concept of labor came early to me. On the weekends I partied and my life hung in a delicate balance between my needs and my way of coping with those needs. Long before my acceptance of Christ, long before any belief in anything beyond the present and scientific world, I battled with an uncompromising and unfair existence. I would not have expected to ever become the person I am now.

But on one of those nights, when I was sixteen, I felt a calling from the Divine. This was not the first time I heard and acknowledged God's voice, but it is a crucial story to tell because I think many of my readers will relate to it. This calling came in the form of the impression of lipstick smeared on the glass wall of the bus station.

At about my height, a girl (presumably) had stood facing the wall before I arrived and left a careless and meaningless gesture that would form the basis of many of my thought processes later on. This stranger had left her mark on the world, her signature in barely pink.

While I waited for my bus I stood and looked at this smear of lipstick for a long time. I first thought it was a clever thing, for it looked like a floating kiss--something of artistic value, a very aesthetic gesture. But then I took the thought a step further and realized it paralleled my relationship with God (who at that point was there but not really there, or rather really there but not there), for my God was invisible and my adoration for Him was too visible. It was a kiss that was not directed to anyone, a meaningless affectionate act, and I concluded in my agnostic mind that meaningless affectionate acts make up the heart and soul of religious belief. It was a kiss directed to every individual who observed it, as well as to God, for every act which uplifts the many uplifts God by definition, for God has a claim in the hearts of all.

The mysterious person who left this piece of art--did she realize that it would be the starting point of a vast inner dialogue in one individual that would eventually lead him to Christ? Did she consider the aesthetic and spiritual significance of her act? I doubt that is the case. But it is God that provides such strange behaviors with meaning, and the most careless and meaninglessness things in the world are still filled with God, for God is omnipresent. By "things" I of course do not mean objects--I am not a pantheist--but I mean expressions, outbursts, and anything that catches the eye of the viewer in just the proper way.

So the next time you see something cute or clever and yet meaningless anyway, challenge yourself to assimilate it, let it change your life, feel the connection--

And I have faith that you will find, as I have, that absolutely everything is meaningful.