by Sean Graham
If you were to ask God how He would define success for you as an individual, I believe He would answer in the following way. God’s success is you being who He made you to be and discovering what that means. God’s success is that cliche, “When you die, God will not ask you why you were not like Paul, Ghandi, Martin Luther King - He will ask you why you were not you?” We are not just afraid of failure, we are afraid of failure and success and so we try to avoid both. We are afraid of becoming who we truly are. If God created it and said it was good, why do we hide it, control it, water it down, shroud it, judge it, diminish it? Or, why do we over emphasize it, puff it up, idealize it? It being “me”.
It is much easier to define ourselves with external measures of success. For me, in understanding the question, “What does success look like?” we have to begin where we die. We have to begin in the grave, standing in the pit, looking up at the tombstone, and ask ourselves, “What would be written there?” What would I hope is the epitaph? What would our spouses, children, friends, neighbours have said about us? I am not talking about nostalgia. Nostalgia robs the past from its truth and remembers for what it was not, but what we wanted it to be. I’m talking about remembering for what actually was. An honest recollection.
From the perspective of my epitaph, my heart knows what success would be and it is: That he lived, he was fully alive, he loved, he laughed, he cried. I hope the people who knew me could say, “I know he loved me”. Like everyone else, I am tempted by, and filled with the gravity of more stuff and more comfort. But when I reflect on what I want my life to mean - all I want is to have loved and to have been loved. Not because I earned it, manipulated it out of people, or controlled it. But because I received it. I was able to see that others loved me. That sight happens when we discover we love ourselves as Christ loved us. Take a risk. I know this will sound morbid, but begin where you die. Imagine the people standing around your grave. What are they thinking about you? What would they write on your epitaph? And do you want that there? Then rewind to today and realize that epitaphs are written every single day, by the choices we make today, this moment.