In a lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School last year, Arthur Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute, analyzed the state of public discourse: “We don’t have an anger problem in American politics. We have a contempt problem in American politics.” Though “Contempt” was not the subject of the lecture, audio engineers chose those comments to feature in a promotional video on Facebook. Within a very short time, the video had received over 12 million views—making Brooks think he might have touched a nerve.

In the last week of 2016, I lined up at the box office to see Rogue One, the Star Wars prequel. I had not heard much about it beforehand, so I was startled by the appearance of Grand Moff Tarkin (villain of Star Wars: A New Hope), played by the original actor from 1977. Peter Cushing had been dead for 22 years, but his head was masterfully superimposed on the body of a live actor. The appearance of a young Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in the last moment of the film enhanced the creep factor, as her death on Dec. 27 was still headline news.

How did an unassuming Sacramento lawyer become the most powerful man in America?

Almost 150 years ago, a young couple loaded a covered wagon with their few belongings and two small daughters and traveled from their home in Wisconsin to a promised land in Kansas. Coming to a stretch of rolling prairie near a creek, the father’s practiced eye sized it up and declared to his wife, “Well Caroline, here’s the place we’ve been looking for. Might as well camp.” As the little girls bedded down in the wagon that night, they felt the stillness of “stars shining down on a great, flat land where no one lived.”

You matter. You matter to those who love you, those who depend on you, those who work with you. Simply by being born you clear a space for yourself in the world that can’t be filled by anyone else. What’s more, you occupy a space in the mind of God—the ultimate definition of “mattering.”

That seems self-evident, but sometimes it takes faith to believe it, and when faith falters and hope fails, mattering itself becomes a burden—even an intolerable burden.

Once upon a sunlit spot of ground, God bent down and shaped a mound of dust. The elemental particles that made up the ground were already in place, and so were the elements of a home: blue sky holding in a band of oxygen, springs of water welling up below, a sun making its stately march across the sphere. “Dust” seems an odd medium for shaping, as it doesn’t stick together. But by divine will it did; its Maker considered it beautiful, like everything else. It was a new shape, never seen before—like everything else.

Here’s one thing I know: Donald Trump’s presidency is one wild roller-coaster ride flashing with neon. By contrast, a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been stop-and-go traffic in a dingy shade of gray.

That’s the limit of my prescience, though. Three years ago I mocked the possibility of a Trump campaign in a column titled “Year-round silly season.” Not many expected he would run, few expected he’d be nominated, and almost no one expected him to win. Silly us!