"A candle loses nothing when it lights another candle."
- Thomas Jefferson
I think one of the big transitions that takes place when young men and women become middle-aged men and women is they (hopefully) begin to think less in terms of "success" and more in terms of "significance." You may wonder what the difference is. I know when I first had someone differentiate between the two I did. One definition is this:
Success is what we do for ourselves. Significance is what we do for others.
Often in our culture, people miss this. They focus on success, rather than significance, often to the detriment of others. Everything in our secular culture tells us this is the right answer. We are constantly told to look out for number one and to watch our backs. There is a fear that by doing something for others we will somehow automatically be allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of. There is a fear that if we support a "competitor" in any way we will somehow be shooting ourselves in the foot, we are just being a sucker. We often carry this mindset in to the church world as well by the way.
Certainly, it's true that there are some selfish and unscrupulous people in the world who will take your kindness as weakness and exploit your good deeds against you. However, it is my conviction that those people represent the minority in our world, though I have certainly encountered my fair share of them as I'm sure you have as well. Truthfully, I'd rather be taken advantage of by a few on rare occasion than cut myself off from everyone and pursue only what is best for myself.
My wife Annette and I watched an amazing movie tonight. I've used clips from it in messages before but I'd never watched the entire movie before. Now that I have, it has become one of my all time favorites. It contains so many powerful messages: success and significance, friendship and forgiveness, healing and supporting, courage and generosity, grace and mercy and so much more. It really is quite a powerful and astounding story; a profound parable. I can't get it out of my head as I sit and write and feel like I could write an entire book on the various life lessons contained in the story. The movie is "Akeelah and the Bee" and I highly recommend it! It's on Netflix if you want to watch it tonight.
I'll avoid any spoilers but there is an incredible moment of truth for the heroine Akeelah where she has to choose between simple success and significance. She unselfishly chooses significance and her decision creates a wave of amazing positive transitions in many other people. In short, she knows at her core that "a candle loses nothing when it lights another candle." Akeelah and the Bee is an incredible story of how decent people should treat one another decently and how the world can be transformed for the better when they do.
So what do we do when we find ourselves in a difficult position like Akeelah, when every survival instinct tells us to focus purely on ourselves and to pursue simple success at all costs and let "significance" be damned? After all, isn't it a dog eat dog world? Isn't it every man (or Akeelah) for themselves? Life's tough enough just taking care of me and mine, why should I care about you and yours too? Few people I know would ever voice that as their true feelings but the honest facts are that their decisions and interactions with others (or lack thereof) sometimes communicate that very sentiment.
What do we do when we find ourselves on the short end of someone else's decision to choose success over significance and who shuts us out in the cold in the process? Well, it's certainly easier to curse the darkness than to light a candle, but we know that's not the legacy our Creator would want us to leave. If you are a person of faith, as I am, then your goal is always to be a child of light, serving The Light who came into the world. The darkness didn't understand Him either and it couldn't overcome Him. Jesus came to spend His life not in success but in significance by continuing to share His light even with those who kept shoving Him to the darkness and He expects us to do the same.
When we've been shut out by others we are more aware than ever when it comes to the frailty of our single candle standing up against the darkness. We worry that sharing our light with others will leave less for us or may even end up putting our light out altogether and stranding us in the cold and in the dark. I love Jefferson's quote that logically offsets this fear. Yet that fear often overcomes logic in human beings. It tries to convince us to hold all our blessings close to us, refusing to share anything with others. The cruelest and saddest part of that self-serving decision is that we often end up shoving others toward the cold darkness in our attempts to promote and protect ourselves.We may feel successful by the world's standards but we will ultimately faith God's test of significance. When people of faith make that tragic decision all of heaven weeps.
I've been through many transitions in my life but as long as I can remember I can say that I have been much more motivated by significance than by pure success. One look at my career path and my checking account will erase any doubts you may have about that. :)
God has called Annette and I to give a lot away in our twenty-three years of marriage. Numerous times we've opened our homes to other people who were in tough spots and needed shelter. We were able to provide it so we did. We have no regrets about any of that and we can testify that our candle never went out by lighting the candles of others. I don't share that to toot my own horn. We've met many along the journey who are far more generous and altruistic than we are.
Recently, we've really come face-to-face with this success vs significance challenge again. Again, middle age has a way of doing that to us. We're on the short side of our earthly life and it's only natural that we begin to take stock in what we've accomplished. Have we made a difference? Is some part of the world a little better for us having been here? Have we made a mark? Will we leave a positive legacy? The way it is typically phrased when it comes out of my mouth: Did I matter? Did my life matter?
As a middle-ager, my transition to age fifty was much more profound than my transition to age forty. Not that forty was uneventful of course as we packed up our family and moved from North Carolina to Ohio to start a church in Gallipolis, Ohio. We landed in town on my 40th birthday. We hadn't sold the house in North Carolina yet and we ended up living in a one room apartment in a pole barn for six months before the house finally sold. This is an example of the generosity of others toward us and continues to be "pay it forward" inspiration for us to offer the same to others in our home. At the time, what we went through during my age forty transition seemed like the riskiest and greatest adventure we would ever go on.
Little did we know that ten years later, my age fifty transition would make that adventure look like novice stuff. Within the two weeks surrounding my fiftieth birthday, I had lost my job, been blown up in a gasoline fire and had begun the long, slow, steady slide toward bankruptcy and homelessness. Oh yeah, I also turned fifty.
Let me get really real with you for a moment and tell you that as a husband, there's not much else in this life that can make you feel like less of a man or more of a complete failure in life than all that. I thank God we had that practice run of challenging times in 2003 to prepare us for this current test. Bankrupt or not, homeless or not, we know from past experience that God is with us and even in the darkest times we will never be alone, the Light will still be there, right by our side.
Certainly, in the current stage of my life, no one could point to my present state and call me a success. There is little room for doubt that I am in a very profound failure recovery program right now. When we find ourselves in these types of positions, cut off from making a living and cut off from most of the relationships we used to count on in life, it's easy to become engulfed by those feelings of failure, abandonment and a profound feeling of jadedness.
However, at the end of the day, while I can absolutely affirm that I am not anywhere close to anything remotely resembling a "success" right now in life, I am still a man who oozes "significance" because even while walking in the current darkness, I am willingly and happily sharing the small light of my candle with every other darkness traveler I meet along the journey. I may be losing now, but I plan on winning again, if not in this life, certainly in the next. In the meantime, my current troubles are an opportunity for growth and learning and I plan on doing both to the best of my ability.
I will learn to be more significant and I will learn how to share my candle with as many people as I can as I lead them out of their times of darkness as well. As my friend John Maxwell says: "Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn." What about you? What kind of transition are you going through right now? I'd love to help you make it through and make sure you learn something valuable along the way.
