Thursday, January 8, 2009

What is success?

In business, you hear talk about succesful companies all of the time. Other companies try to copy those companies. Churches tend to do the same thing. Copy whatever works somewhere else. Whatever creates a buzz is sure to be emulated elsewhere. The thing is that those that are successful today, may be gone tomorrow. What works to create their success today, may disappear before they know it. Success can be fleeting for organizations or it can last over the long haul. All of this to say, how do you determine if you are successful in life? Most tend to measure personal success by the amount of money, or fame or power that you have. Like in business, those can seemingly disappear overnight. So what is the gauge you use to determine if you are successful personally? Is there something tangible to measure against to tell if you are successful or is it just a feeling? Does it even matter if we are successful? Just curious about a word that I hear thrown around a lot but no one ever really defines.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Success absolutely matters. But "success" doesn't guarantee a lot of the things people think it does. It doesn't guarantee that anyone will have ever even heard your name let alone that you'll be on the cover of TIME. It doesn't guarantee that you'll even live happy or die with anything more than a pair of scivies and a 5 o'clock shadow. I think we will know whether or not we were successful when we hear (or don't hear) the "well done" of good and faithful servants. Until then, we just have to continually ask God to search us and reveal to us the areas where we are not being faithful and then make every area to correct those things. I've been wrestling with what this means lately thanks to an email from a friend...:) and I think that I could do youth ministry "successfully" for 35 years and never baptize a student. But if I studied, worked hard, prayed harder, invested in people, served people, loved people, and loved Jesus, I think it would be a success.

anxiously hopeful said...

Dying with nothing but a pair of scivies and a 5 o'clock shadow...
I'm not sure what the details or success look like for me but I sure hope I don't die like that. I think that success this week would mean that I saw what God was doing around me and jumped on board knowing that he will work through me and accoplish HIS agenda.