Day 4079 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 73:3 NIV

What is success?

Is it something best proven in prosperity and thus presented only in profit? Is it a matter minted in money or maybe measured by material? Is it the funds of fun as are found in friendship or just another of such fame's fantastical fakeries? Is it a consideration of coziness considered inside comfort or merely another confusion of complacency? Is it the reward of royalty or just the dream of those destitute? Is it seen inside the substance of where we’re standing and thus waiting for us to want it enough to win it? Is it something then lost by those who lose the lane in life along which it lies?

Is it lies?

What is success?

For the strangeness of this life is that it seems as if it means something different to each of us. To some it’s the sum seen inside a bank account. To others it’s having a whole bunch of sisters and brothers inside what is a large family made of the success of the parents’ desire to have a children. To many it appears made of material as is what makes the mansions so many dream of residing in. To others it’s a job that brings with it a cool-sounding title and such a level of power that it’s almost awkward how important they are.

But it seems that it is something seen differently by everyone.

And yet how can that be of anything?

How can everything have so come about that it’s all just quite dependent upon what we have and yet oftentimes perceive that we go without? How can success be seen inside so many different things if all of our eyes can see the same things? How is it held in different ideas when our minds are all made of the same matter? How can success succeed in sowing so much chatter when it’s supposed to make you happy and content in life? Indeed, how can life consist inside an abundance of possessions which themselves only exist inside of life?

You see, at some point the whole thing just breaks down into what becomes such an utter illegitimacy that nowadays we even make illiteracy seem something of a goal to be gained.

Seriously, what’s up with all these insurance commercials leaning so heavily on this idea of it being funny that folks can’t speak or spell properly? What does that have to do with needing help in the event of a car accident?

Could it be that we’ve become so successful here inside our own individual ideals of success that now we just delight to make a mess of the very thing that makes us man?

For the birds can’t talk and yet they live what are the very lives for which they were designed. Same is said of seahorses that float in the tide which are nothing like the other horses which we ride on land. Dogs can’t speak and yet they do seem of the ability to succeed in understanding us whenever we talk to them. Cats do their own thing and don’t really ever seem all that interested in anyone else’s ideas as to what they ought to be doing instead.

That kind of sounds like success.

But still, despite the digress, I just seem to have arrived at this impasse in regard to the idea of success as anymore it seems to us to be something seen inside so very many things, thoughts, theories that it would take us all a million eternities to find it in all of its forms. And in fact, on that, there would probably be plenty of forms involved as we seem to have devolved toward this idea that there needs to be always another who just has to be involved so as to ensure that our success revolves around some kind of rule written by those who’ve successfully navigated the path toward their desire to rule in what is merely a life made of up rules they often legislate but oddly enough don’t really care to follow.

Is that success?

Is it beating the system upon which we have to rely and in which we’re told to trust so as to overcome the nonsense strewn all throughout? Is it the freedom found in feeling as if we’re above the law, unable to fall, unworthy of ever having to crawl as we’ve already learned to walk so well that we could probably win a race were we still in our prime? Is it the medals that some of us have won in having learned how to run real fast or swim real good or cook a meal that some tv show judge tells us tastes just right?

Or maybe it’s not that show but the other that’s kind of like it in which folks compete to figure out who’s the best when it comes to the ability to sing.

It’s got idol in the title.

And indeed, now it seems as if we’re getting closer to whatever it is that success is supposed to be.

For I believe that anymore it’s something mostly made up of idolatry. Could be that version felt in us whenever we see another who seems to have had more success than us as is apparently made in their having made the millions we still don’t have. Or maybe it’s the kind carried by those who allow their phones to carry their lives as their camera is what seems most successful at capturing their cares and helping them share them with those who will then probably care about them too.

Because that seems like something that success should do.

And that’s because, to us at least, that is what success usually does. It inspires in us this quite insatiable ideal in which there’s always something more to find, something bigger to be, something better to see and that hopefully in our houses and that hopefully as soon as possible. Is success then proven in both possessions but also the impatience in which we can’t wait to have them?

Is it the excitement for which many exist or perhaps the entertainment in which most don’t?

I don’t know anymore. And that’s because I’ve tried for a whole lot of the different ideas as to what or in what success might be found or felt. And I’ve indeed seemingly found the natural conclusion of both. Does success end? Does joy have an expiration date? Might meaning meet its own demise? What meaning can have a life when it’s only everything inside of it but not of us that seems to matter the most whenever we set to measure whatever it is that we alone think success to be?

Is it something that we have to see or does not the seeing herein the evidence thereof only seem to limit the entire idea?

I mean everything here does have an end point, a finish line, a final outcome either toward which we run or from which we usually try. Take death for example. It’s a fear found in many and thus has long been something that most here run away from and usually refuse to talk about. Apparently then expecting success in only their ability to avoid it for as long as possible. And yet then again there are those who are at last becoming quite intrigued by the promise as they believe in the promise which awaits beyond it as was given by He who succeeded in His having came to overcome death on our behalf.

Which means then that even something so feared as death means something of success to those who believe in something else, something better even that waits just beyond the moment we meet it.

But those who fear it still are still found by most to be those whom we should seek to be like as they have in this life managed to find so very much success that their affluence has achieved an arrogance that allows them to have seemingly become quite well convinced that they can find or force, buy most likely, a way to avoid the fear of many and thus remain in this place in which their every treasure remains.

Because that’s what idolatry does.

It causes us to become certain of this idea that this life is the one in which we need to seek for whatever it is that success means to us because, well, as of today it’s the only life we can know for sure that we have. And indeed, there are so many things inside this world that have been given such a measure of meaning that it seems as if our lives here mean nothing until we have them too. And so we too decide to do whatever those who have them tell us we should or show us we might as they have within their lives what we think we need in ours.

That’s why this ongoing fascination with celebrity. It’s because they all live in this idealized lap of luxury in which they have all the fame and fortune and thus influence and attention that we’ve all at times wanted too. Never mind that they literally got there doing nothing other than rehearsing lines and playing roles that are that of people they’re not or maybe singing songs that they didn’t write and that thus they have no real personal connection to.

Doesn’t matter.

Because the world loves them and we want the world to love us too.

And so we determine to endeavor to do whatever we have to in order to reach that place in this place in which we too have achieved so much in this place that either we too hope we’ll not die so that we go on enjoying all we’ve found or forced in life or that we’ll at least become rich and famous enough that folks will remember us when we can’t make that hope successful.

But don’t you see the point?

It’s that no matter what we have, what we do, what all or little we try, everything in this life is promised to be left behind. And that’s because despite the measure of power or preference or opinion or the sheer number of presently available options all the above achieve for those who seek incessantly for them, nothing and no one has ever proven of the ability to cheat death of its inevitability.

Well, there were a few but they can be counted on a single hand without needing the thumb or pinky, and that’s because, like the three fingers in between them which represent the three men recounted in the Scriptures that did successfully manage to actually make it out of here alive, they did so because they too made God the center of everything. Indeed, these three were found of such faith that their fate was determined to be without the death that none of the rest of us have ever proven we’ve the ability to so successfully avoid.

And that’s because the rest of us have proven quite faithful, but alas that to mostly only things here.

And that’s because all of us have fallen for this idea that it’s what’s here that best proves our success in life as is seen both by our eyes and too of those looking to us to either do what they have so that we’ll have what they do or rather to follow us as we have already whatever they don’t.

But again, it all just comes always to this idea of success being seen inside the things seen inside of our lives as are lived, for now at least, inside of this place that does indeed have an innumerable number of things that seem to mean something to someone.

And if focused on or worried over long enough, they’ll come to matter to us too.

Because again, that’s what idolatry knows to do.

It’s this life spent looking at worldly things seen and seeing inside of them this assurance of something, this promise of something, this profit of something that, being a people of greed and gluttony, is probably something we can’t bear to go any further without. Because, to us, success in life has nothing at all to do with going without whatever it is that we’ve come to want or will before long. No, rather to us success is proven in our having what we want and that as soon as humanly possible.

But that’s just it!

So much of what we consider to be success is just another succeeding at their having or doing of something that humans can have and do. Indeed, we spend our lives staring at the world around us trying to find within it the best of things to store around us. And this eventually leads only to us studying those who have what we want or are where we want to be, who we want to be trying to see inside what they have and where they are and who they are signs of what we need to do for our lives to be the same.

Cut to a world filled with folks who are never happy and know nothing of contentment because their lives are always lacking something that someone else has. Seriously, we’re the single most advanced and prosperous generation in the history of human habitation and yet we’re arguably the most jealous, unhappy and unholy as well.

And why?

Because we’ve fallen for this lie that success is something known only in gain. And in this we’ve spent our lives seeking for the sum of those things which have never once brought anything to our lives that was worth the amount of time that we gave to gaining them. And that because once we had them, our lust for them didn’t actually dissolve but rather just moved on to the next idol we’d made of something else that we then couldn’t imagine our lives being lived any longer without.

For there it is again.

We’ve become a people who loathe the idea of doing without. And that’s because there’s just so much here that we should be able to have and enjoy as much of as much of it as we might like to try or know or feel or hold. Because we envy those who already do. Because their lives always seem better than ours simply because they have whatever it is that we want too.

But friends, all that envy ever really does is continue to inspire in us an ongoing willingness to continually conspire against contentment. No, instead we want comfort. We want fame. We want mostly the fortune that comes with it so that we can finally afford all the things that we think would surely make our lives far more comfortable and probably fun too.

Because those things are what seem to matter most to those so lost here that they think that what is here is all there is.

Is it?

Again, I too have at times believed that and gone to some great lengths to prove it. Only to finally reach it or achieve it or be able to afford to buy it only to hold it and see still something else I’d like to have.

But I’m tired of living like that because, well, eventually we’re all going to realize how vastly it breaks us down and wears us out all this trying to find everything that everyone else has or is or hopes to be. Indeed, folks are going blind staring at screens trying to find clues as to what all they need to do in order to become whoever someone else already is simply because the other person already has what they still want.

Yes, life here is measured always in want.

And sadly then success is apparently proven only whenever we finally have what we’d previously wanted.

But again, is it?

For the truth is that all of us have had a whole bunch of things in this life. How many of them continue to matter now? Rather how many have we forgotten or misplaced or sold in a garage sale or elsewise since moved on from?

It all just seems increasingly stupid anymore. For after all, how much more do we really need in life before we can finally be grateful that we are in fact alive? How many more things do we truly need to buy before we’ll allow ourselves to believe that our lives mean something? Does life really only mean whatever we have within it? Are we thus meaningless so long as we don’t have something we wish we did?

What will any of it mean when we’re actually dead seeing as how, again, only three men have left this world alive and all them because they had a faith the kind that God chose to reward with the opportunity to never see the outcome of the mortality to be proven in the rest of us?

We live in this world so filled with envy and jealousy and the unhappiness and discontentment that they insist on instilling inside of us that, well, unhappiness and discontentment are things that all of us have known more often than we’re probably willing to admit. But why allow for such detractors from life in life? Is success, the version we’ve settled for at least, truly more important than such things as joy and peace and contentment?

And if not then why do we still agree to the version of success that many here are still enamored by?

Friends, we have one go at this life and, well, we will be judged according to the fruit we bear as is to be determined by the seeds we both sow and too allow sown in us.

What then are we growing and, just as important, what all is growing in us?

Is it hope? Joy? Love? Kindness? Compassion? Humility? Honesty? Generosity?

Or is it greed and gluttony and envy and jealousy and just our wishing always that we were something else or had something more?

That’s what this world has to muddle through and mess with inside this version of success that is seen always as something someone else has or is. Thankfully we’ve been offered a freedom from this in His Word asking us to store up for ourselves treasures in Heaven and to not envy those who don’t know they’re perishing and to trust that godliness served with contentment is all the gain we could ever hope to have.

And why is that?

Because if we have God in our hearts then it won’t matter anymore what we do or don’t have in our lives as our souls will finally be able to understand that where we stand is just the tip of eternity’s iceberg. It’s because we’ll finally realize that our eyes could never possibly see the entirety of forever, and too that we’ve then no reason to ask them to try and find it here anymore as we’re, in Him, promised that here isn’t forever but that rather He’s left here to make ready us a place wherever forever is.

Let us not continue to get so lost along the way. For He’s told us that of here we need nothing as nor are we of here either.

So let us then focus only on the Father and deepening our faith therein. Because the truth is that all here will fade and be forgotten. And we should all know this to be true because, well, just look at how much of all we’ve had that we too have already left behind.

Do the same with the rest of everything here and you’ll finally start to truly understand what true success has always been.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold