Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To
him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. 2 Peter
3:18.
In an earlier devotion we looked at the difference between good
ambition (God/others first) and bad ambition (me first). Shakespeare
has King Henry VIII admonish Cromwell about bad ambition: ‘I charge
thee, fling away ambition. By that sin fell the angels… How can man
then, the image of his Maker, hope to gain by’t?’ (Henry VIII, Act 3,
Scene 2).
Once when attending a ‘directed retreat’ we were asked to think about
this question: ‘What is your desire?’ It’s another way of asking, ‘What
drives me? Is the glory of God my primary ambition, and other things
secondary ambitions?’
Being ambitious (for the right reasons) is OK, growing is acceptable,
but success is addictive. We must grow beyond past successes. As
Kettering put it, bluntly: ‘The minute you get satisfied with what
you’ve got the concrete has begun to set in your head.’ Was it George
Bernard Shaw who talked about being dead at thirty and buried at sixty?
As Rudyard Kipling suggests, let’s treat those two impostors – success
and failure – the same.
So whether I succeed or fail, may my desire be acceptable to you, my
Lord and my King. Amen.