Reflect Jesus, Serve Others

Once upon a time - 2003 - I had a mission statement.  I was very proud of it.  I thought of it all by myself.  It was a pretty good one, I thought, full of purpose and meaning and scope:

To Write for Impact

To Preserve for The Future

To Lead for Change

To Glorify God

Quite the statement, right?  Very forward thinking and action sounding.  Very sort of "Live to leave a legacy".  The sort of thing that future great people have.

Nothing worked out that way, of course.

My "Writing for Impact" resulted in a number of items which did not become the best sellers I was hoping for but fulfilled a dream of writing (and little else).  My blog, although enjoyable (and through which I have met a number of very fine human beings) did not become the monumental change agent for future I expected it would be simply by its existence.  My "Preserving for The Future" seemed to have slipped away when I moved away from where I was thinking I was supposed to be preserving, halfway across the country.

"Leading for Change" never happened.  Despite my rather grandiose imagination, no leadership position appeared - except the sort of leadership positions that are not recognized positions but exist on the fringes of the light, more the sorts of things that one has to do to survive work rather than become drowned by it.  And "Glorifying God" - which in my mind was nothing less than church leadership on a public platform - disintegrated and melted into quiet service in my hands.

The statement itself died a sort of postscript death around 2014, quietly slipping beneath the waves of realities that could not support it.  But I never really thought to replace it until recently.

It has reduced to this:

Reflect Jesus

Serve Others

Reflect Jesus:  Make my life an image of Him in that people see Christ through me.  Be the mirror that reflects Him in their lives, the window through which He can be seen. 

Serve Others:  Always seek to be of service.  Do the work you see that is undone.  

There, I noted as wrote these four words, a rather marked lack of self in them.  Which is actually as it should be.  Nor is there a great deal of direction as to know how these things will be accomplished.  And especially there is no "This is how I will serve God - or not at all".  I think we can agree - or at least I can - that such plans such as I have tried in these matters have, on the whole, ended in rather abysmal failure.

Do I believe that this change in mission statements will somehow lead to all the success I thought I was entitled to?  Not at all - in fact, I have ceased to expect any sort of success at all.  Because the Christian life is never ultimately judged on how "successful" one is has been.  All I can do is reflect Christ and serve others and leave to direction and the outcome to Him.