Lately I’ve become dependent on my GPS navigation device for car trips. Mine has a male, British voice—I call him Hugh. I enter a starting location, then type in things like “avoid freeways” or “shortest distance.” Hugh even helps me schedule stops along the way, such as restaurants and sightseeing attractions. But it’s the destination that’s most important to enter into the GPS—where do I want to end up?
The same principle applies in your life journey. If your destination is success, measured by career achievements and wealth, the driving directions that will get you there might look at this:
- Become a workaholic
- Stay on the highway at all costs
- Avoid costly detours like family, friends, relationships, and service to others
- Value money over people
- Turn off your moral compass
For followers of Christ, there’s a destination that summarizes the two greatest commandments in the Bible: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. These driving directions might include:
- Take detours when someone needs your help
- Pay more attention to your moral compass than your bank balance
- Get off the highway for parent/teacher conferences, clarinet recitals, and soccer games
- Invest your time, talent, and treasure in enriching others’ lives
- Take the scenic route, even though it’s slower and has more potholes
Joining World Vision was a major recalibration in my journey. I had to get off the career highway, quit a job I worked 25 years to get, and take a cut in pay. Some of my former corporate colleagues think I’ve gotten badly off track. But actually, I haven’t. My life goal—my destination—has always been to love God and love my neighbor.
What’s your destination? Are you open to the twists and turns that might take you there?
I am struggling with the overtones of redistribution of wealth in your book. We are doing the series in my church currently and I totally am on board with all the ideas coming from the book and study DVD, but you do not address to the root cause for all the hunger and disease. We as Americans are the most charitable people this world has ever seen but the evil that rules a lot of the African nations are the reason the continent is so messed up. What about freeing these people as our forefathers freed us and educating them as we have educated ourselves over the past 230+ years. That is what gives us the ability to obtain wealth both financially and spiritually. It gives us the ability to take this wealth and spirituality and share our excesses with the poor and the less fortunate both locally and abroad. Bashing what you call the “American dream” (which is NOT what our founding fathers like George Whitfield created as the American dream, i.e. the Land of Opportunity, religious freedom, and the fact that all men are created equal)only drives those away that have worked hard and obtained elevated wealth and freedoms. I just can’t get my arms around the negativity equated with an individual working hard and obtaining financial freedom and wealth, while tithing 10%, just to be guilted into to giving it for someone else’s own personal cause versus what the individual believes God has called him to do.
In the Bible there is always mention of poor and less fortunate and how we are supposed to help them but never does the idea of guilt or give up all you have because you have worked to obtain a decent lifestyle. It is your responsibility as a Christian to take the blessings God has given you and do the best you can to honor them. Just a struggling Christian that is looking for answers in life and there after.
Mark
I am re-reading “The Hole in Our Gospel” after completing my first full-time semester in grad school. I’d been chipping away at it on a part-time basis, but the Lord “recalibrated” me in December when I lost my job. Amazing how He will do that. It feels odd, not working; but very liberating, not having to force myself to do work that had become meaningless. I had the ideal job and was perfectly poised to move into management, but the more I saw what “management” was like, the less I wanted to be a part of it. (It definitely involved becoming a workaholic and turning off my moral compass.) I know God has something else for me, and I just want to make sure I am staying on His track, now. Thanks for the encouragement, Mr. Stearns.