Jul 06

Trading off your heart’s desire for personal security

I have just finished reading a book in which the author quoted Mother Theresa:

“We are not here to be successful we are here to be faithful.”

Mother Theresa was perhaps referring to her “calling” to help the poor. When I read this quote I felt that there is a divide being suggested by Mother Theresa that is worth considering on a Sunday morning. The question I have is this: To be successful often requires sacrifice of personal values yet most successful people are highly actualised individuals living a fairly successful life! Take the Richard Bransons of the world. These people are highly effective as people and quite successful. They appear to be living in the their values and actualising their destiny.

However, I don’t really think Mother Theresa meant this saying as ROI. I think she meant to say that, in order to follow purpose and be faithful you must learn to change the way you assess your life. The measuring stick you use to say, “I am successful” should become “I am faithful”. Faithfulness is an entirely different quality than success orientation. Yet, inherent in the concepts of personal success are the exact qualities of faithfulness to personal desire we see Mother Theresa talking about. This brings me to my point (at last): Most people I have me trade off their ‘faithfulness’ for a sense of ‘personal security’… myself included. Here are two recent examples of people I happen to know:

Person A said to me the other day that they like to invent things and showed me a very clever device that they had built that was about tracking trajectory of bullets and recording speed etc. I must admit I had no idea of what it could do but the concept fascinated me. This person then went on to say something that struck me. It would be what they would do if life didn’t get in the way. The personal security they got from their job meant they traded off the need to be faithful to themselves.

Person B I met at a conference I was part of organising. This individual was highly successful and very enthusiastic. I got to talking to this person and realised when I was talking to them that they had never traded anything for faithfulness and wound up being successful anyway. Was this some kind of accident. No. As I got to talking to this person I learned that he had learned at a very young age that if you want to make it, you have to take risks and follow your heart… even if it means trading off personal security for a little while. That is, to find your life’s purpose you must never trade off your values to find personal security.

Between these two examples is an important truth. There are some people who find success in what they do on both the level of personal security and faithfulness. These are a rare breed. My wife happens to be one of these people. God bless her, you can’t make her do anything she doesn’t think she shouldn’t be doing. Her personal conviction (shared with me) is that somebody should be home to take care of the children. Now, I respect people who don’t share my convictions and this way of life isn’t for everyone. However, my wife has chosen in her case to live from her heart and invest time in our children instead of working. There is a huge cost involved here and I am paying for it! Yet, living from the heart and not trading off personal security is what Mother Theresa I think is hinting at.

I could cite others who I believe have found the nexus between personal security and faithfulness but I will leave it up to you to seek them out. I want to finish this post today with a thought that struck me when I read that quote. Purpose doesn’t necessarity mean riches but it does mean a level of success that goes beyond the idea of materialism and into a deeper more satisfying spiritual level. There is no guarantee that if we quit our jobs and begin to do the things we love that we will make money. Nevertheless, if we continue (myself included) living a life that reflects more “personal security” than “heart value” we will find a level of misery than transcends our desire for personal security. What we must do, is find a way to express our hearts desire on a daily basis anyway while we have personal security… but that is another post for another day.