Do you search for significance? This past week I realized in one of those “aha” moments, there is still a longing in my life for significance. The ego is a funny thing in our lives, when living in the flesh we seem to have this ongoing vision problem of seeking intend of savoring.
As our family prepares a joyful place, our small home in the country, we are healthy, we are together, we are living a dream we’ve dreamed for many years, yet I catch myself thinking/searching for proofs of the significance of the actions. Self talk can be such a sneaky thing, don’t you think? In the present I am so very thankful, proud, and excited about the hard work we’ve done together.
Without paying attention though, I can easily go to a “I need to work faster, harder, self incrimination mode.” Who is that echo in my head? I assure you it is one of many folks who destroy their own daily lives. In my work with others, and myself, I consistently ask,
“Where is YOUR When?”
“What is Success?”
“Where is your Enough?”
It is interesting how often the answer is in position or role, not being.
What challenges your significance? I often ask myself what is enough? The last few years I have worked on a book that deals with the discipline of peace. I personally believe that when our hearts and minds are at peace as we face whatever we face, that is where faith lives, where the life we desire lives. Life is going to daily bring what it brings to our door, but we choose how to engage it, we choose how to receive and allow it. When I am living at a pace and environment internally that is supportive of a peaceful life my days hum along, the difficult days come and go, but my daily life is pleasant even in the midst of adversity. The discipline of peace knows that significance is in loving yourself, allowing others to love you to the extent they can, and choosing to live a life fueled from a peaceful mind and heart, not an academy award level performance track for leading drama player.
Most days whatever this is I am and whomever this is I exist as is enough. I do my best, I seek to learn how to be better at being who I am, and I fail often. I am not hung up most days on others perceptions of me, but then the search for significance hits. Someone asks you to define what you do as though it is who you are. They challenge that your choices are enough, that your lifestyle is enough, that you are settling perhaps for what they think is enough. Most days those conversations just are met with a “you don’t get it” thought in my head and are shrugged off. I’ve been down many tracks in life, many of them worldly successful but internally stressful, filled with days of striving, not living.
Yet at forty-nine I find that I still apparently have that “Search for Significance” beacon in my head from time to time. The life I want to live is a faithful one. Faithful to my Creator, faithful to my husband, faithful to my friends and family. To be able to be counted on, to know that the smallest of service actions matter in love more than any accolade a public one may achieve. I seek to be a loyal heart, one that is counted on and can be trusted. To be a comforter, a peacemaker, and most of all an encourager, through education and presence. To love people as they truly are, not as I’d like them to be. To me, that is significance, to engage the gifts you are given and to put them to a harvest of love-driven fruit in others’ lives. It doesn’t look very good on a resume, it often won’t receive worldly acclaim, but it surely provides a life I want to live.
Where does your search for significance lead you? What pushes your buttons on being enough? How do your chosen choices conflict with the worldly messages of where success lies? I hope you’ll take time to list and learn your own paths to success. To celebrate them daily, to allow yourself the peaceful moments to affirm that whomever you choose to be is your choice and that peaceful living is a path maker to a life you’d want to live. When was the last time you realized at the end of the day that your life hummed that day? How often do you allow yourself to be who you yourself seek to be? God has a good bit to say on the subject of who you are. My friend Lucy Ann Moll has a downloadable at her website that tells each of us five names he has for us (and none of them are the ones are the ugly ones my self talk used to say, nor imply we are not made to be who we are!)
Sweetieland, this daily existence I call my life, is changing in this year of allowing. I rather like the landscape of what I am painting into my life through seeking the discipline of peace. It’s taking a few coats of cleaning the canvas, of starting with a fresh slate, but we only have this day, this life, this being we call our hearts and minds. . . .Isn’t it time you own your life and make it your own?
