Pursue or Ensue?

1 Corinthians 15:58 “Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain.”

A reflective Sting said in an interview: “Getting what I had desired for so long – success – and finding it didn’t equate with actual happiness, made me even more unhappy. What is happiness? It’s not in being famous or desired by all these people. It must be somewhere else.” Queen’s Freddie Mercury said shortly before his death: “You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man, and that is the most bitter type of loneliness. Success has brought me world idolisation and millions of pounds, but it’s prevented me from having the one thing we all need – a loving, on-going relationship.”

Victor Frankl provides a solution with regards the pursuit of success: “Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

I hope that ultimately you can say that the ‘cause greater than oneself’, the ‘person other than oneself’ in your life is Jesus. If that is the case, then success need not be measured by how you do compared to how somebody else does, but by how you do compared to what you could have done with what God gave you. It follows from your commitment to obeying Jesus in your daily life. It touches on your working life, but also your family life, and your community life. How am I doing as a brother, a husband, a son, a father? How am I doing as a friend, a colleague, a neighbour?

Lord, help me to surrender to you today – to put seeking your will above my pursuit of success and happiness. Amen!