The Lure of Success

This post is one of those that has been rolling around in my head for a while. I think it will have two parts, but we’ll see how it actually ends up.

SUCCESS. What is it really? How does one achieve it? What is one’s purpose in life?

I guess it’s not too surprising that I’ve been thinking about this recently. I graduated from college five months ago, and as a result I’m greeted by my perception of all these expectations which the people I care about and the culture have of me. To get a great job in my career field. To make good on everything that got poured into me the past four years. To make my degree, with its $100,000+ sticker price, “worth it.” To hopefully get married and have a wonderful family life. Etc, etc.

And a good part of me would like nothing better than to land that job and to know where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing for a good long while. To feed my hunger to be able to identify myself by what I do—to be able to support myself and to be “in control” of my present. It would be so seemingly easy if God would just get on board and go along with my plan. Or, I would be well on the way to being married by now, and would have reached my view of “success” that way.

But it seems as though just as soon as I create a vision of what I think I want and what would work out well, something doesn’t go my way and I wind up back at square one all over again. Because ever since I graduated, nothing has truly gone the way I expected it too. That hunger I have to “succeed,” to somehow meet people’s (including my own) high expectations of me—it feels like I have failed at it.

As I have spent the past two months waiting to hear back from SP, then trying to figure my life out after that door closed……..I’ve been thinking about what I see as “success” for my life. And I begin to see the trap I’ve fallen into. I yearn for the apparent stability of either my own “real” job that I can identify myself by, or of a family of my own that I can pour myself into. But thus far, neither has worked out. Instead, I’m still “bumming” off my parents, five months after graduation. I definitely didn’t think it would come to this. I didn’t want it to.

At any rate, I had this picture of success in which my identity was bound up in WHAT I did. Thinking about what success is, I’ve been reminded it goes much deeper than that. My next post will look at what I’m relearning about that. But it is so much harder than the “easy” way that our American culture seems to tantalize me with, settling down into a good career and staying there for forever (though I know that’s becoming less common anyway).

Ever since high school, though, I’ve said I don’t really want to have a career like that. I had my reasons for that, but I’m beginning to see something different. Last month—even before I heard back from SP—I had a sense that God was asking me to lay down my desire for certainty about where I’m going to be and what I’m going to be doing five years from now – or two, or one. For a long time—as I’ve written about before—He’s been calling me to trust Him and to give up my hunger for control. But it is hard—because for me, at least, the lure of success is strong.