What if the way you go about doing your job or living your life is so meaningless you end up being someone else’s meal ticket?

When is the last time you stopped and took a seriously honest evaluation of the effectiveness of your work or meaningfulness of your life? What if your life depended on your ability to add real meaning and significance to the lives of others around you? What if your greatest weaknesses could be used as keys to unlock and help others to get out of jail? What if how we go about sharing our lives with others really does matter?

It could make our life a meal ticket for others or like a very important key that opens and closes prison doors.

It was 1990-something and I was attempting to finish college on the five-year program. I was studying to become a foreign missionary and preparing to go and tell the world about God’s love for them.

I was taking a missions class I needed and the professor shared a story that caught my attention. He talked about a missionary who went to Africa. It seemed every day since the white man showed up in the village, all he did was wave a big black book at the villagers and shout at them in a language they didn’t understand.

When the men went to the river to fish, he would stand at the shore and wave the big book. When the women would prepare for dinner, he would wave the big book at them, too. When the men went out to hunt, he would wave the big book and shout, scaring away the game and discourage all the tribe’s men who were hunting to provide food for the village. When the women would make pottery or work on sewing clothing or retrieving fresh water, he would just wave the book while they made clothes and moved water.

Finally, the chief spoke to the men and women of the village and decided the white man was not at all helpful because all he did was shout and eat a lot of their food. So they unanimously decided to cook him and eat him for dinner.

Because the black book seemed so important to him, they would put it in the pot and cook them together in hopes it might make him taste sweeter.

“I’m glad I’m not that missionary,” I thought.

I never have been to Africa, but I did volunteer at a halfway house for incarcerated teenage boys in the 1990s. And I remember waving a black book at them and excitingly telling them about all the truths in the book.

Almost none of the young men attended the Bible study and the few who did admitted they just came to get out of chores or away from other inmates.

I didn’t want Bible study time to be meaningless and end up just being a meal ticket as often times those who attended would be allowed to eat some dessert from the kitchen. I didn’t want to be like the missionary who ended up in the dinner pot — just eating their food and taking up space.

Failure to assimilate in foreign cultures makes you a foreigner and completely irrelevant in a world desperate for you to make the book of love come alive with meaning.

Failure was not an option. Then it occurred to me, “I grew up in South Oak Cliff, Texas.” I approached the staff and asked if we could take our Bible study outside in the yard. It seemed the only day they went out was Saturday. So I asked if I could come visit with the residents then. They approved me and I changed my visit days.

When I showed up on Saturday, I started learning how to play prison basketball. (No fouls are called). I challenged them to some Texas-style tackle the man with the football.

I started getting other students from the college to join me in playing some smash mouth tackle the man with the football and prison basketball with the children. We lifted weights and wrestled in the rec room.

Before you knew it, the Bible study class started to be better attended and the inmates started asking questions and listening to my answers. I no longer was just a meal ticket for the extra dessert. I was a boy from South Oak Cliff who wasn’t afraid of getting a bloody lip playing tackle football and talking to them about my childhood in a very rough neighborhood.

I never will forget the day those boys began asking me to pray for them. One by one, I was allowed to pray with these jail-hardened children and for some of them, our friendship became a key that unlocked the doors of their cells and their hearts.

What about your life? Are you going through the motions of your work in meaningless ways, preparing you to be some else’s meal ticket or are you engaging others finding ways to pour out your life adding such value? Whatever you do, become a key player — someone way too valuable to ever end up in any soup pot for dinner. You either can be shared as a meaningful meal for others or you can share meaningful meals with others.

Dr. T.J. Kimble of Radcliff is a clinical pastoral counselor. He can be reached at tj@yourbestlifenowcounseling.com.