A young friend of mine (and my friends are getting younger all the time!) posed this question to me, “What does success mean to you?”
Since I’ve thought about that a bit, my answer came quickly:
Success to me is:
• Significance….investing in others as others have invested in me and with integrity from them to me and me to others.
• Also (and most importantly) not WHO I am but WHOSE I am.
• Meaningless if what I do is just for myself, my own goals, my own direction, my own anything. I need to intentionally invest in others because of what the LORD has done for me. I want other to know HIM.
• Not doing just what is comfortable, easy, and fun, but what is RIGHT.
• Not necessarily in this order….
I know for each of us it will look differently, but selfish ambition and success are oxymoron’s to me. You can make it “up the ladder of success” and even make money and all sorts of other things, but without knowing and serving the Lord “in” what we’re doing….there would be little value in it all.
Perhaps the most fun thing for any of us is when we realize that no one really cares about us, or our worldly successes, and thus it’s much easier to just serve the Lord with complete faithfulness. A great “place” to be. I call it my “happy place”!