Success

 “To leave the world a bit better, whether by healthy child, a garden patch, or redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you live—that is to have succeeded.”

                                                   Ralph Waldo Emerson

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We ask the question different ways

At different times of our lives

What do I want to be when I grow up!

Which career option is really “me”

Have I lived a life worth living

But most of us, if we are honest,

are actually pretty concerned about whether our lives on this planet

have had meaning.

Meaning and purpose count!

We want to make a difference

But what makes a life “count”

How do we measure value and success?

It is the number of degrees?

(I have two Masters and a Doctorate)

Is it jobs held?

(I have been very blessed to have pastored four churches,

 Done international disaster relief, taught at a medical school,

 and run a community based mental health program)

Is it titles

(you may call me the Rev. Dr. Father, Sir if you wish, or not)

Do we measure success by the fact that we have “stuff”

A nice house

Cool cars

Our net worth?

Do we count if we have power?

Even if we don’t admit it I suspect that for many of us these are indeed

the things we count.

But I can’t help but think about Jesus, and his strange, conflictual life

and his scandalous end

And I can’t help but think of what he taught about life

And what it means to be “blessed”

Accordingly we have made our lives count

according to the Divine Economy when

We have expended ourselves for others in a costly way (become poor).

We have entered into the pain of others, and sat with them in that pain

We have chose the way of service rather than dominance

We have fought for what is right, instead of what is convenient or beneficial for us.

When we have had empathy and have been people who welcome rather than exclude

When we have insisted that we must base our behavior on purity, and do not accept lying, fraud, bullying, name calling, and all the impurities that come from the ego.

When we choose the way of peace rather than the way of violence and retribution.

We have succeeded when, because we hold fast to the way of Jesus

Those who worship power and wealth call us snowflakes and libertards,

Weak and pathetic.

Our job is to make sure that we don’t leave behind us

a trail littered with people who have been shamed, neglected, used, or abused

but to walk through life

helping, encouraging, healing

lifting up

making sure no one

no one (all means all)

gets left behind

our job is indeed

“To leave the world a bit better, whether by healthy child, a garden patch, or redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you live”