Shining some light

Just imagine what the world might be like if tomorrow everybody on the planet won the lottery. I know, it ain’t going to happen, so why bother talking about it? Simply to make this point: A great amount of human activity and productivity appears to be focused primarily on meeting our own personal needs.

If I had lots and lots of money in the bank, mucho dinero, would I honestly busy myself trying to meet the needs of others? Can’t say for sure, but I suspect that my country’s productivity would decline if we really didn’t need to produce and sell anything to anyone. For example, with the delay of the proposed Keystone pipeline, are Canadians more concerned about ordinary Americans who will be deprived of our oil or fellow Canadians who will be deprived of their cash?

The economic animal image we are all familiar with is that of a dog-eat-dog world not to mention racing-rats, as opposed to… maybe a warm and loving community of caring cats.

Am I suggesting, then, that we should just forget about our own needs and focus solely on the needs of others? Not at all. The career-column thought for today is simply this: A career, at least from a Christian perspective, is what you do to meet your own needs and the needs of others. We need to strike a balance.

And having said this, it is immediately obvious why so many God-fearing people tend to take a dim view of getting into the drug dealing business. For what is going on? A small group of people become filthy rich by essentially destroying the lives of many, many others.

One implication, then, of this mutually beneficial career mandate is that each one of us needs to think seriously about three things: who we are going to serve, exactly how we are going to serve them, and – just as importantly – how we are going to get paid for it in the process. The problem is that many of us have a tendency to fixate on the third thing and forget about the first two.

So as you work towards establishing some sort of career and life direction, be sure to clarify how you plan on going about shining some light, as it were, into somebody else’s world.

2 comments

Mania Article

There are some interesting points in time in this article but I don’t know if I see all of them center to heart. There is some validity but I will take hold opinion until I look into it further. Good article , thanks and we want more! Added to FeedBurner as well

January 04, 2012

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