Restpiration

What Makes One Great?

What makes someone great?

We often have fairly straightforward answers to this question. We point to wealth, influence, achievement, intelligence, talent or the number of people who know someone’s name. A person builds a successful company, wins an extraordinary number of awards, becomes a celebrated artist, changes an industry or accumulates great wealth, and we instinctively place that person among the great.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things. Achievement matters. Excellence matters. The ability to accomplish something significant can be a wonderful expression of human potential. But I wonder if we sometimes confuse being impressive with being great.

What would remain of greatness if we removed fame, wealth and achievement?

Imagine that nobody knew your name. There were no awards attached to your accomplishments, no impressive title beside it, no large audience applauding you and no way for history to remember what you had done. Would there still be something great about the way you lived?

A different picture of greatness

When I think about this, I find the life of Jesus almost impossible to overlook.

Here is a man who was “in very nature God” and yet did not use his position as something to cling to. Instead, Philippians 2 tells us that he “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant.”

That is a remarkable picture of greatness.

If we were writing the story ourselves, we might expect someone of such immense authority to arrive surrounded by grandeur. We might expect displays of power, status and superiority. Yet Jesus repeatedly moves in the opposite direction. He touches the untouchable, welcomes the rejected, heals the sick, feeds the hungry, teaches ordinary people and gives his attention to those whom society often overlooks.

Then comes one of the most striking scenes in the Gospels…Jesus takes a towel, pours water into a basin and begins washing his disciples’ feet. The disciples are startled because the person doing the washing is their teacher and Lord. Yet Jesus does not merely perform the act. He uses it to redefine greatness.

“You also should do as I have done to you,” he says.

There is something deeply challenging about that image. The person with the highest authority in the room takes the lowest position in the room.

And Jesus later makes the principle explicit: “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.”

This is a very different vision of greatness from the one we often inherit. We tend to think of greatness as rising above others. Jesus presents greatness as becoming willing to serve others. We imagine that having more means having more people serve us. Jesus shows what it can look like when having more means having more to give.

The greatness of giving yourself

The life of Jesus makes this idea even more profound because his service was not limited to impressive moments. He fed people when they were hungry. He taught people who were searching. He healed people who were suffering. He spent time with people who were often treated as outsiders. Again and again, what he possessed became something he could give.

Eventually, his giving reaches its fullest expression in the cross where he says, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

That sentence turns our ordinary understanding of greatness upside down. The one who could have demanded service chooses service. The one who could have used power to preserve himself gives himself for others.

And perhaps this is why the life of Jesus raises a question that reaches far beyond religious language: What are you doing with what you have been given?

Your intelligence, your education, your money, your influence, your opportunities, your strength, your time, your creativity, your experience. Are these things becoming monuments to yourself, or are they becoming gifts through which other people can flourish?

This does not mean that achievement is unimportant. Jesus himself lived a life of extraordinary accomplishment. The question is what sits underneath the accomplishment.

Are we trying to prove that we matter, or are we allowing what we have to become useful to something beyond ourselves?

Whose life can become better because I am here?

There is something liberating about this understanding of greatness because it removes the pressure to become famous.

You don’t have to become known by millions of people for your life to matter. You don’t have to build an empire or leave your name in history books. A teacher can change the course of a student’s life. A parent can give a child an experience of love that shapes the person they become. A friend can stand beside someone during a season when everyone else has disappeared. Someone can choose not to pass the wounds they inherited on to the next generation.

These things may never receive applause, but they are not small.

This brings me back to the question: Whose life can become better because I am here?

I find that question much more revealing than asking, “How successful can I become?” It shifts attention away from the size of our platform and toward the quality of our presence in the lives of others.

And it does not require us to become less ambitious. It simply gives ambition a better direction.

Build something excellent, but let people benefit from it. Become knowledgeable, but let your knowledge serve others. Become financially successful, but allow your resources to create opportunities beyond yourself. Develop your gifts, not merely so that you can stand above people, but so that you can contribute something that would be missing if you had never developed them.

This is where achievement and greatness can meet. Achievement asks, “What have I accomplished?” Greatness asks another question: “What became possible for others because of what I accomplished?”

A different measure

Perhaps the deepest challenge in the example of Jesus is that he demonstrates greatness without self-exaltation. He does not need to constantly remind people of who he is. He can kneel down and wash feet. He can touch a leper. He can sit with people others avoid. He can feed a crowd. He can forgive. He can give himself away. And then, after all of this, he tells his followers that they are to do likewise.

“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

This is not an invitation to think poorly of ourselves or to become doormats for everyone around us. Service is not the same as having no boundaries, and humility is not self-contempt. Jesus was capable of confronting hypocrisy, withdrawing from crowds, saying no and speaking difficult truths.

His greatness was not that he made himself insignificant. It was that his significance did not need to be used for self-glorification. That distinction matters.

Maybe the highest expression of our abilities is not how high they can take us, but how much good they can carry through us. So I keep returning to those questions. What would remain of greatness if we removed fame, wealth and achievement? Whose life can become better because I am here? What am I doing with what has been placed in my hands?

And when I look at Jesus, I find an answer that continues to challenge my ordinary ideas about greatness.

The greatest person in the room may not be the one demanding attention.

It may be the one who notices who needs help and is willing to serve.

The greatest life may not be the one that is most admired.

It may be the one that gives the most love, truth, courage and goodness to the lives it touches.

Jesus put it simply: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Maybe greatness was never primarily about how much of the world we can make look at us.

Maybe it is about how much good can flow through us into the world.

Embracing All of Life

There is something rather strange about the way we approach life. We want certain things from it, and when those things are missing, we can become convinced that life will finally feel good once they arrive. We want stability, success, love, financial security, good health, meaningful work, freedom from our struggles and some assurance that we are heading in the right direction. None of these desires are unreasonable. Yet somewhere in our pursuit of them, we can become so focused on improving our lives that we forget to actually experience them.

Life is full of paradoxes. We want freedom, yet some structure is necessary for us to experience it. We want certainty, yet so much of what makes life interesting comes from not knowing what will happen next. We want to change, while simultaneously longing for things to remain familiar. We want to be understood by others, but there are moments when we desperately need to be alone. We try to avoid suffering, yet some of our deepest appreciation for joy, love and contentment comes from having known what it means to struggle.

Life may never completely resolve these contradictions for us. Maybe part of living well is learning to hold them without constantly trying to choose one side.

The temptation to wait for life to begin

One of the easiest ways to miss life is to keep imagining that some future circumstance will finally make everything feel right.

We tell ourselves that things will be better once we finish school, find the right job, earn enough money, overcome a particular habit, become more disciplined, find the right person, or finally figure ourselves out. There is nothing wrong with hoping for these things. The trouble begins when our appreciation of the present becomes dependent on them.

The future, however, rarely arrives looking exactly as we imagined it. We solve one problem and discover another. We achieve one goal and begin thinking about the next. We finally obtain something we had long desired, only to discover that the mind has already found something else to pursue.

This does not make ambition meaningless. It simply reminds us that a good life cannot depend entirely on reaching some imagined point where everything has finally fallen into place.

So the question is not only, “Where am I going?” but also, “Can I appreciate what is happening while I am on my way?”

Life does not have to be perfect to be enjoyed

Sometimes we imagine that relishing life means being happy with everything that happens. It does not.

There will be disappointments, difficult conversations, financial pressures, unanswered questions, failed attempts and days when we simply do not feel like ourselves. Pretending otherwise would only add another burden to the experience.

Embracing all of life means allowing the difficult parts to belong to the story too. A quiet morning can be beautiful even when there is an unresolved problem waiting for you. A conversation with someone you love can still be precious even when your relationship is not perfect. You can be uncertain about your future and still enjoy the strange little details of your present life.

The point is not to turn every painful experience into a lesson or convince yourself that everything happens for a reason. Some things hurt because they hurt. Some seasons are simply difficult. Yet difficulty does not have to disqualify the rest of life from being enjoyed.

The trap of turning life into a project

This becomes particularly relevant when we are trying to change ourselves.

There is a healthy desire to grow. We want to overcome destructive patterns, become more disciplined, understand ourselves better and live according to what matters to us. These are worthwhile pursuits. Yet self-improvement can quietly become another way of making our acceptance of ourselves conditional.

We begin thinking, I will finally be okay when I have overcome this. I will feel worthy when I become more disciplined. I will be at peace when I become more spiritual. I will be satisfied when I become the person I think I am supposed to be.

Without noticing, we turn ourselves into unfinished projects.

The strange irony is that the person doing all this improving is already living. There is no future version of you who gets to experience life on your behalf. There is only this version, here in the middle of everything, still learning, still making mistakes, still carrying unresolved things and still capable of laughing, loving, resting and being amazed.

Growth does not require constant dissatisfaction with who we are. We can work on ourselves while extending some kindness to the person who is doing the work.

We don’t have to squeeze meaning out of everything

I think there is another subtle way we can fail to relish life: by demanding that every experience give us something.

We want the conversation to be meaningful, the trip to be memorable, the book to teach us something, the difficult season to make us stronger and even our ordinary days to somehow become evidence of personal growth. But life does not always need to justify itself.

You can take a walk simply because the weather is pleasant. You can laugh at something silly without needing it to represent anything deeper. You can sit with someone you love and enjoy their company without wondering whether the moment is significant enough. A meal can simply be delicious, a song can simply be enjoyable, and an afternoon can pass without producing an insight you can carry into tomorrow.

There is freedom in allowing experiences to be what they are instead of constantly asking them to become something more.

Learning to receive the moment

Relishing life may have less to do with creating perfect experiences and more to do with becoming available to the experiences that are already here.

Think of sitting with someone you love while your mind is busy evaluating the evening. Is this going well? Should we be doing something more interesting? What happens afterwards? Are they enjoying themselves? Is this how I imagined it would be?

You can spend the entire evening managing the experience and barely experience it.

There are moments when we need to stop trying so hard to make life into something and simply receive what it is offering us. That does not mean becoming passive or abandoning our hopes. It means allowing the present to have some value of its own, rather than constantly measuring it against some standard of how life ought to feel.

Sometimes the richest part of an experience is found when we stop standing outside it and evaluating it.

The paradox of embracing all of life

Maybe this is the great paradox. We spend so much energy trying to arrange life into the form we think will make us happy, yet some of the deepest enjoyment comes when we become willing to encounter life as it actually is.

When we stop demanding that every circumstance conform to our expectations, we begin noticing things that were always there. The familiar road becomes a little more interesting. A conversation lasts a little longer because we are actually listening. A meal is enjoyed instead of consumed while our minds race ahead. We notice the evening light, the laughter of someone nearby and the comfort of resting after a long day.

Nothing extraordinary necessarily happened. We were simply there for what was happening.

And perhaps that is what it means to embrace all of life. It is not about loving every circumstance, pretending that pain is pleasant or stopping ourselves from wanting things to improve. It is about making room for the whole experience without constantly sorting it into what we want and what we wish were different.

The difficult season, the ordinary afternoon, the unfinished dream, the mistake, the laughter, the uncertainty, the affection, the disappointment and the unexpected little joys all belong to this strange experience of being alive.

Life does not have to become perfect before it becomes worth appreciating. It is already here, with all its contradictions, and maybe there is something beautiful about learning to meet it as it comes.

Why We Hide From The Light

Can we have a conversation about why we sometimes avoid the light of God’s presence?

Think back to the Garden of Eden.

The picture Scripture gives us at the beginning is remarkably beautiful. Adam and Eve lived in communion with God. There was no distance, no awkwardness, no hiding. They were naked and yet unashamed, completely exposed and completely at home.

And then there was that beautiful picture of God walking in the garden “in the cool of the day.”

I imagine that the thought of God thrilled their souls. His presence was not something to escape from. It was something to look forward to. Until everything changed…

They ate from the forbidden tree. I do not claim to know exactly what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents, whether it was literal, symbolic, or something beyond our present understanding. But the larger picture is clear. They disobeyed God, and their response to God is perhaps one of the most revealing things in the whole story.

They hid.

“Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”

Think about that for a moment.

The One whose presence had once been their joy suddenly became the One from whom they wanted to hide.

What happened?

The fear of rejection

The first thing we notice is that they became conscious of their nakedness. They suddenly saw themselves differently. What had previously been completely natural now felt shameful.

Perhaps this is one of the first things sin does to us.

It makes us feel exposed.

And when we feel exposed, we become afraid of rejection.

Isn’t this deeply human?

We dread rejection so much that we sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to secure acceptance. We change ourselves to fit into groups. We pretend to be people we are not. We join in things we know are wrong because everyone else is doing them. We compromise convictions because we are afraid of being left out.

So much of what we call peer pressure is simply the human longing to belong wearing a different face.

Adam and Eve were suddenly afraid that the light would expose them and that, once exposed, they would no longer be wanted.

And perhaps we do the same thing with God.

We fail.

We fall.

We become ashamed of ourselves.

Then instead of running towards God, we hide behind the trees of distraction, busyness, religious performance, self-condemnation, or simply staying away.

But there may have been another fear at work.

The fear of debt

Someone once joked that the fastest way to sabotage a friendship is for one person to become terribly indebted to the other.

It was said humorously, but there is some truth in it.

When you know you owe someone something you cannot repay, their presence can become uncomfortable. You avoid their calls. You hesitate to meet them. Even a simple greeting can remind you of what you owe.

Sin can create that kind of consciousness before God.

“I have failed again.”

“How can I pray after what I have done?”

“How can I come into God’s presence when I am not living the way I should?”

We begin to imagine God standing on the other side of our failure, waiting for us to settle the account. And so we hide. But here is where the gospel becomes astonishing.

The debt has been dealt with in Christ.

You do not have to approach God carrying an unpaid bill for holiness, purity and righteousness. Christ has become our righteousness. This does not make sin insignificant, rather, it makes grace magnificent. God does not say, “Clean yourself up, settle your account, become worthy, and then come back.” He comes to us in Christ, and supplies what we could never produce for ourselves.

This is why the words of 1 John 4:18 are so beautiful:

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.”

What if the presence of God is not a courtroom we should avoid until we have prepared our defence?

What if it is the very place we should run to when we have fallen?

This is where I love something Charles H. Spurgeon, the nineteenth-century English Baptist preacher and pastor, said: “Holiness is not the way to Christ; Christ is the way to holiness.”

That reverses something we often get wrong. We imagine that we must become holy enough to approach Christ.

But the gospel says that we approach Christ, and He leads us into holiness.

The difference is enormous.

If holiness is the entrance fee, then every failure becomes a reason to stay away. But if Christ is the way, then failure becomes a reason to draw nearer.

Perhaps this is what the story of Eden is inviting us to reconsider. The instinct to hide is understandable. Shame tells us to disappear. Fear tells us to keep our distance. Guilt tells us we should first make ourselves presentable.

Grace says something entirely different.

Come into the light.

Not because you have nothing to hide but because the One who sees everything already knows.

Not because you have paid your debt but because Christ has paid what you could never pay.

Not because you have finally become worthy of His presence but because His love has made a way for you to come home.

Maybe the question is not simply, “Why do I keep failing?”

Maybe sometimes we should ask, “Why do I keep hiding from the One who wants me to come closer?”

The trees may give us somewhere to hide but they were never home. The presence of God was, and will always be.

When Life Starts to Feel Like the Same Day

I sometimes find it fascinating that no two days are ever exactly alike. Even when everything appears ordinary, this particular day will never come again. The people we meet, the thoughts that pass through our minds, the conversations we have, even the version of ourselves experiencing them, are all slightly different.

And yet, life can feel remarkably repetitive.

We wake up, go through our routines, face familiar responsibilities, encounter familiar struggles, and eventually go to bed. Then another day arrives, and somehow we find ourselves doing much of the same thing all over again.

Sometimes it is not even the circumstances that repeat. It is us.

We make the same mistakes. We fall into the same habits. We worry about the same things. We procrastinate in familiar ways and become frustrated with ourselves for doing so. We experience the same emotional patterns and occasionally wonder whether anything is really changing.

After a while, life can begin to feel like a song we have heard so many times that we barely notice the music anymore.

The strange thing about repetition

There is nothing inherently wrong with routine. In fact, much of life depends on it. We could hardly function if we had to consciously figure out every little thing we do each day.

The problem comes when familiarity begins to replace attention.

We stop really seeing the morning because we have seen hundreds of mornings before. We stop listening closely to people because we think we already know what they are going to say. We move through our surroundings while our minds are somewhere else, replaying yesterday or anticipating tomorrow.

The day is new, but our way of meeting it may not be.

This could explain why life sometimes feels monotonous even when, objectively speaking, nothing is ever exactly repeated.

Maybe we are looking for novelty in the wrong place

When life feels boring, our first instinct may be to look for something new. A new place, a new relationship, a new experience, a new purchase, a new goal. There is nothing wrong with any of these things, but sometimes we can keep changing the scenery without changing the way we see.

And then the new eventually becomes familiar too.

What we are really longing for may not always be a different life, but a different relationship with the life we already have.

The same walk can feel different when we are actually present for it. The same conversation can reveal something new when we stop assuming we already know the person. Even an ordinary meal can become strangely enjoyable when we are not rushing through it while thinking about what comes next.

The novelty may not always be in the experience itself.

Sometimes it is in our attention.

You don’t have to make every day extraordinary

There is another trap here.

When we become dissatisfied with routine, we may start believing that every day needs to be special. We need an adventure, a breakthrough, a memorable experience, something worth telling someone about.

But that can become exhausting too.

A meaningful life cannot consist entirely of extraordinary moments. Most of life will probably remain wonderfully ordinary. There will be dishes to wash, assignments to complete, work to do, familiar roads to travel and evenings when nothing particularly interesting happens.

The goal may not be to make every day extraordinary. It may simply be to stop being absent from the ordinary.

There is a difference between living a repetitive life and experiencing life repetitively.

The first may simply be a description of our circumstances. The second has something to do with the quality of our attention.

The day has never happened before

Tomorrow will probably contain some of the same things today contained. There may be familiar responsibilities, familiar temptations, familiar worries and perhaps even some of the same mistakes.

But tomorrow itself has never happened before.

Neither have you experienced it in exactly this form.

Maybe that is enough to approach it with a little curiosity.

Not the pressure to make something extraordinary happen, but the willingness to notice what is already here. To listen a little more closely. To look again. To allow someone to surprise you. To notice when an old pattern appears without immediately becoming discouraged by its presence.

Life may sometimes feel like the same song playing again and again. But maybe we have been listening only for the melody. There are always small variations in the music.

The invitation may simply be to be here long enough to hear them.

The Next Reasonable Step

There are moments in life when the distance between where we are and where we want to be can feel overwhelming. Perhaps something has gone badly wrong and we are wondering how to begin again. Perhaps there is a dream we have carried for years, but the thought of everything it would take to make it real leaves us wondering whether it is even worth attempting. Sometimes it is not even a dream. It may simply be a fear we have lived with for so long that overcoming it feels like a project in itself.

In moments like these, we often make the mistake of looking too far ahead. We want to know how everything will work out before we take the first step. We want the plan, the confidence, the resources and some assurance that our efforts will eventually lead somewhere worthwhile.

But life rarely gives us all of that in advance.

Perhaps what we need is not the whole plan, but the next reasonable step.

You Don’t Have to See the Whole Staircase

Think about climbing a staircase. When you are standing at the bottom, you do not need to somehow move yourself to the top in one movement. You take the step that is immediately in front of you, and from that new position, the next step becomes available.

Life often works in much the same way.

We sometimes become frustrated because we cannot see how the whole journey will unfold. But perhaps the next part of the journey is not supposed to be visible yet. There are things we can only understand after we have moved a little further.

You may begin with an idea and discover along the way that it needs to change. You may take a job thinking it is leading you in one direction and later discover an entirely different opportunity because of the experience you gained there. You may begin learning something simply out of curiosity and eventually discover that it has opened a door you never knew existed.

The next higher step often becomes obvious after the first one has already been taken.

This does not mean that we should move through life without thought or direction. It simply means that we should not demand complete certainty from ourselves before allowing ourselves to move.

Start With What Is Within Reach

After a setback, our instinct may be to think about everything that needs fixing. We think about the time lost, the consequences, the people affected and how much work it will take to get back to where we were.

That can be exhausting before we have even begun.

Perhaps a more useful question is, “What is the next thing I can reasonably do?”

Maybe it is making a phone call. Maybe it is admitting that something did not work and deciding what can be learned from it. Maybe it is returning to a responsibility that we have been avoiding. Maybe it is asking for help.

The step may appear small compared with the size of the problem, but that does not make it meaningless. A person rebuilding after a difficult season does not rebuild everything in a single afternoon. They begin somewhere.

The same principle applies to our dreams. An impossible dream can become less intimidating when we stop asking how we will accomplish everything and start asking what we can do today that moves us in its direction.

You may not be able to build the whole thing yet. But perhaps you can learn one skill. Read one book. Speak to one person. Make one application. Put aside a small amount of money. Spend an hour working on the idea.

It may not feel like much, but neither does a single brick when you are imagining a house.

Perhaps Courage Begins With Curiosity

We can approach fear in the same way.

When we are afraid of something, we sometimes imagine that overcoming it requires a dramatic act of bravery. We think that one day we must simply decide to be fearless and do the very thing we have been avoiding.

But what if courage can begin much more subtly?

Perhaps the first step is simply to name the fear honestly.

“I am afraid of failing.”

“I am afraid people will judge me.”

“I am afraid that if I try, I will discover that I am not good enough.”

There is something useful about being able to say, “This is what I am afraid of.” Once we can see the fear clearly, we can become curious about it rather than simply obeying it.

Where did this fear come from? What is it trying to protect me from? Is the outcome I am imagining inevitable? What would actually happen if I tried? And if things did not go as I hoped, would I really be unable to recover?

We may discover that the first step toward courage is not confronting the entire fear but becoming curious enough to question it.

Perhaps you are not ready to walk boldly into the situation that scares you. That does not mean you are stuck. You can take a smaller step. You can have the conversation in your head first. You can gather some information. You can try something in a less intimidating setting.

Don’t Go Ahead of Yourself

Sometimes we make things harder by mentally living several steps ahead of where we actually are.

We are dealing with today’s problem while worrying about next month’s problem and imagining all the problems that might come after that. A single step becomes exhausting because we have somehow turned it into ten steps in our minds.

There is a certain freedom in allowing yourself to deal with what is actually in front of you.

You do not have to know exactly how your life will look five years from now before deciding what would be worthwhile today. You do not have to know how a dream will eventually unfold before giving it an honest beginning. You do not have to become completely fearless before doing something that matters to you.

Sometimes the most sensible thing is simply to stay with the part of the journey that is yours to walk now.

This is not an argument for laziness or complacency. Taking the next reasonable step is not the same as taking the easiest step. Sometimes the reasonable step will be difficult. It may require discipline, an uncomfortable conversation, a difficult decision or the humility to begin again.

The point is simply that you do not have to carry the entire journey at once.

Mountains Are Moved One Stone at a Time

When we look at a mountain, it is easy to wonder how anyone could possibly move it. But perhaps that is because we imagine moving the whole mountain in one effort.

Human beings accomplish extraordinary things through ordinary actions repeated over time. A book is written one page at a time. A skill is developed through practice. A relationship is strengthened through countless small acts of attention. A life is changed through decisions that may seem insignificant when viewed individually.

Even mountains, metaphorically speaking, can be moved one stone at a time.

So if you are facing a setback, perhaps you do not need to figure out how to rebuild everything today. If you have an impossible dream, perhaps you do not need to know exactly how you will achieve it. If there is a fear standing in your way, perhaps you do not need to become fearless overnight.

Ask yourself a simpler question: What is the next reasonable step?

Then take it.

You may find that the next step after that becomes clearer once you are standing on this one.

And if it does not, pause. Look again. Learn something. Adjust your direction if necessary. Then take another step.

There is no need to rush yourself into a future that has not yet arrived.

Perhaps all that life is asking of you today is to take the step that is yours to take.

Tomorrow, there may be another.

And one day, when you look back, you may realise that what once seemed like an impossible distance was crossed in a way that felt almost ordinary: one reasonable step after another.