From My Standpoint

If you are anything like me you may wonder sometimes how you know if you are doing well.  What does success in this life truly look like?  I am not talking about a typical perspective on money, career aspirations, etc, but rather a genuine glimpse into what success looks like for the person who is trying to live in a manner worthy of God's work in their life.  How do I know if I am growing into the kind of person God intended for me to be?  For the person who wants their life to matter and make a difference, who doesn't just want to consume things their entire life, but rather to create things and make an impact for the bettering of others' lives - How can this person guage their success into those types of endeavors. 

This is what I am wrestling with right now and at church this morning, a young pastor made a very insightful comment when talking about spiritual growth.  He was talking about whether a person is worldly or spiritual (in reference to Paul's conversation with the church in Corinth - 1 Cor. 3:1-9) and said that the worldy person views their world in constant reference to themselves.  They are at the center and they can only see God from their perspective.  He said that Mt. Hood was about 2 inches big in his world - from the bus stop outside of his house.  He knew that in reality, Mt. Hood was really 11,239 ft above sea level but that if he viewed the world solely from his own perspective, Mt. Hood was merely 2 inches tall - rather un-awesome.  Now, to travel to the base of Hood is to see a huge mountain, topped with snow, covered in trees, big enough to change weather patterns, and awesome enough to be seen hundreds of miles away. 

Our relationship with God is like that as well.  When I see God merely through my own eyes He can appear far off and therefore very, very, very, small.  In relation, I am 68 inches tall and therefore bigger and more powerful than my pint sized talisman.  In fact, the further I drift from His presence and more I wander from Him, the smaller He becomes, until finally when I have distanced myself far enough from Him, He fits in the palm of my hand.  I don't want to serve a God who fits in my hand - that is nothing impressive nor divine, and yet that is exactly what I create.  It is only in drawing near to Him and learning to see my world through his eyes that I see how small I really am and how great He truly is.  Unfortunately this easy "mental" jump is proving far more difficult when I attempt to walk it out physically.

I struggle to guage success, synonomous with growth in this instance, because my perspective of who God is has been so mangled by my own self-centered nature.  Ironically, the very God, who I have now managed to fit in the palm of my hand is the very same God who I yearn for so desperately to answer the deep questions of my heart.  By taking the Divine and distancing myself so far from Him that He appears merely               un-awesome, I am left searching for these answers in places that were never meant to answer them - this is my great undoing.  Minimizing the One who could transform me has left me fending for myself and that is scary - scary that controlling one's life can leave one...well in control.