| Wednesday, November 02, 2011 |
| Sacrifice and Success - 1 Samuel 2:18-21 |
I noticed a new ad the other day while watching football on the TV. It was a for one of those gigantic hardware stores, and they had adopted a new slogan. "Never stop improving". This sounds nice. I can see why they chose this slogan. I don't want to stop improving. I want to improve. I think most people are that way. As smart as the ad was to pull on our inner desire to be a better people, of course they don't necessarily care about us as people, they were talking about home improvement, and by home improvement, I mean that they were trying to convince you to rip out that old bathtub and put in one with jets that gives you a massage and has a built in cappuccino machine. They weren't encouraging us to become better people, rather they were using our desire to improve to encourage us to upgrade our houses and our appliances, to buy more stuff. I wonder if this twisted view of improvement goes deeper than we think in our personal and cultural psyche?
When we talk about improvement in our society, we also are talking about success. Success seems to be what most of us are seeking in life, and we are trying to improve toward success constantly. But what is success? Is it having more stuff? Is it having nicer stuff? Can we claim success when we are finically stable and seemingly insulated from harm? How do we define success? I know one thing, the two parents we read about in this passage, Hannah and Elkanah, would probably define success much differently than many of us. Their definition of success was directly connected to their voluntary sacrifice.
It is hard for me to imagine only seeing my son a few times a year at most. As I write this, my wife is expecting our third son. My four year old and I sat on the couch this morning and talked, as only a four year old and his father can do, about what life would be like after the baby came. It is going to be different, but wonderful. Now I try to picture myself in Hannah and Elkanah's position. Hannah after suffering with infertility so long, and Elkanah who loved Hannah so, had a son and knew that this was God answering their prayers. So in response they gave what they loved the most back to God. They gave their son to serve, to be raised, and to live in the place of worship. They probably only saw him, a few times a year. Everything they had worked for...they gave it up. They made a sacrifice of immense proportion which for them came from a different understanding of success.
The idea of sacrifice doesn't usually come into our thinking when we define success. We see sacrifice as a necessary evil, a stepping stone on the way to a time in our life when we don't have to sacrifice. We sacrifice for a time so we can come to a time when we don't have to sacrifice any longer. But what if sacrifice is success? What if giving back to God the son that had been giving to them, Hannah and Elkanah actually found what true success is? It is interesting that we see that because of their honoring God with Samuel their son, God gave Hannah and Elkanah five more children. This happened to the woman who had been barren for so long. But she didn't dedicate Samuel to get something from God. She sacrificed because she realized that it was within the sacrifice to God that success was truly found. God responded, but it was because of her heart. She understood what true success was...following God and giving all of one's self, treasures to dreams, for him.
It makes me ask, "what have I been working towards?" and "What is God calling me to give to him".
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posted by Unknown @ 11:42 AM   |
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