You Can Skim This One

How will you measure my life?

Clayton Christensen is a Harvard Business School professor who recently wrote an article posing this question to graduating MBA students. The author is a Christian and offers a model that is meant to be used to by individuals to define the important things in their life and what metrics are pertinent to track implementation. A short read, I highly recommend it.  

Where is my value found?


Placing my value entirely in God is impossible. It goes without saying that I would tell you I want my value to be completely interwoven into the fabric of our relationship, but my actions betray my altruistic rhetoric. In fact, using pretentious language like "altruistic rhetoric" just tied up some value in what I perceive as a facetious mind.

I spend a lot of my time trying to make sure that I seem valuable through: popularity, professional success, relationships, personal appearance, a wise demeanor and fractiously battle any enemy -- especially God. These exogenous variables valiantly defy the Almighty, but why?

Unusual circumstances often serve as points of clarification. Recently, God revealed how satisfying and "right" it was to yield all (or as much as my sinful mind could) of my value proposition into His grace and loving arms.


Eternity panic attacks

In Ernest Becker's book, The Denial of Death, he discusses the dualism of having an animalistic nature with all the functions of a sentient being-but also having a symbolic self, such as a name and self-awareness. This thought led me to an "eternity panic attack" which I occasionally have. You know, the thought of forever and what that will be like. I can grasp the idea that I have a symbolic self and how that places me on higher tier of creation, but if you want to feel insignificant and completely dependent, look up at the sky and imagine uninterrupted existence.

The dualism of having a symbolic self, like a name and cogent thought processes combined with the eternal purpose that God created us makes me feel like a dumb mule. Thankfully, God grants a clue to this dumb mule, and has offered the gift of eternal life.

It was interesting that when I stopped fretting about eternity, I looked less at myself and began to look at ways I could spread this exhilarating thought.

-Luke (sorry if this post was overly fragmented...hopefully you just skimmed it anyway :)