The Measure of Success?

Are you a success?  I mean are you personally successful?  I mean, is your personhood a success?

Have you ever seen the bumper sticker that says, “He who dies with the most toys, wins!”?

I beg to differ.  Sure, it’s said with tongue in cheek.  Still, we live as if it were ever so true, as if real success were measured by money, size of house, make, model and speed of car and so forth.  It’s dead wrong.

Neither money nor power is the measure of true success.  We’d like to think so because these things are tangible, measurable, and they do turn heads, eliciting great admiration and respect, and jealousy.  But such outer success is as permanent as one’s youthful good looks.

To measure real success we’d have to look at what’s going on within us, in our person—our heart and soul, our spirit.  That’s where the real quality of success lies.

For example, do you have a great career, nice house, sporty car, and great reputation but still find yourself bitter, angry, resentful, sad, depressed, lonely, and/or mad at the world?  Do you have everything that advertisements tell you that you should have and then some, but still find yourself being envious and jealous of others?  Are you always comparing yourself with others?  Are you proud, arrogant, greedy, selfish, dismissive and judgmental of others?  Do you think yourself better than others but fear that others won’t or don’t notice how gifted you are?

A truly successful person is one who has learned to be at peace within one’s self, to be content.  A successful person is one who has learned to love deeply and is greatly loved in return.  A successful person is one who has gained respect not for the wealth and riches he or she commands but for one’s genuine authenticity, trustworthiness, integrity, honesty, humility, fairness, and goodness.  A successful person is a balanced person, inwardly secure, and is not threatened by those who are more talented and/or gifted than he or she is.  I submit that few of us know this kind of success—partly because few of us aim for that kind of success. 

But when an economy turns sour and people lose their jobs, the difference between outward success and inward success begins to surface.  Stripped of our jobs, income, and career identities, we begin to ask ourselves who we really are.  Do we have value beyond things, cars, houses, and investments?

We do.

But without a job and steady income it sure doesn’t seem like it.

Perhaps we have been measuring our self-worth by a wrong set of standards.

It might help to remember that at the end of the day, when the twilight of our life is at hand and we are leaving this earth, it won’t be the amount of money that we’ve earned and collected over a lifetime that will matter.  Nor will it be the amount of property and the size of our investment portfolio that we leave to the next generation (though the beneficiaries will very much be concerned about those things).  Nor will it be our public personae, whether we have successfully made celebrity status in our particular field of expertise or career choice.

No, what God will look at is our inner person, what kind of person did we become over all the years given to us?  God will measure our success by the quality of our heart and soul.  God will see the fruit of our life, not the things of our life.  Fruit as in: peace, love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness.  How successful are we in those terms?