HOW WILL GOD MEASURE YOUR LIFE?

It is not the norm for Business School academics to turn attention to matters of how students can identify their personal purpose and find fulfilment in life.

That sort of endeavour is usually reserved for private spaces, for people who practice some kind of religious faith or consider themselves spiritual. That is, however, exactly what happened eight years ago when renowned business thinker and innovation consultant Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business

School was approached to address graduating students on how to apply some of the academic wisdom for which he had become famous, to their post-university careers and life.

Christensen’s Christian faith was thus brought to bear on the now seminal article “How Will You Measure Your

Life?” Some of the thoughts shared in that publication are helpful for reflection on finding purpose and meaning in our lives.

Being an academic, Christensen’s approach is to pose three core questions to his students: first, how can you be sure you’ll be happy in your career?; second, how can you be sure your relationships with your spouse and family will be an enduring source of happiness?; and third, how can you be sure you’ll stay out of jail, given the to remain humble and always be moral and ethical challenges busieager to learn from everybody; and ness leaders worldwide will continusixth, don’t ever fret about the levally face? By this line of questioning, el of personal fame you attain, but Christensen is shifting the young, rather focus on the persons you help ambitious student’s focus from buyto become better along the way. ing, selling, leadership and management to the more fundamental matters of life: personal happiness, fruitful personal relationships and an ethical or moral code for lifelong success. These, he maintains, are more important than all the business and economics theories they have learnt in Business School. “I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched. I think that’s the way it will work for us all. … This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, HOW WOULD YOU MEASURE YOUR SUCCESS IN LIFE? An academic’s guide your life will be judged a to success in life would not be comsuccess”, states Christensen. Put difplete without theories and their apferently, one could say the famous plication. There are six such wisdom Business scholar is asking, ‘How nuggets recommended by ChrisWould You Measure Your Success in tensen. First, create a strategy for Life?’ It is not a reflection to be taken your life; second, allocate your perlightly, which is why I take the liberty sonal resources of time, energy and to flip the question as follows: ‘How talent wisely; third, create a culture at Will God Measure Your Life?’ This latter home to ensure your children learn formulation is perhaps helpful beto choose rightly in various situacause in an age of increasing individtions because families have cultures, ualism, it is quite possible to define just like companies do; fourth, avoid one’s success criteria and completely moral or ethical failures by rejecting leave out a more eternal perspective. the lie that your wrong choice will be done ‘just this once’; fifth, remember That is to say, one must answer the

question of purpose and fulfilment only by returning to the basics: Who are we and why are we here? Our lives are projects in God’s hands, quite easy to measure really. We are born. We live. We die. We rise again. We are judged. We are either found wanting or found adequate. Of course, there is a deeper level of meaning and satisfaction to life than the stark metric measure painted above; yet, the underlying truth remains unchanged: in this world, we are pilgrims and strangers. We are merely passing through. Our foremost assignment while on this planet is to find God and worship Him in spirit and in truth. God is looking for such persons to worship Him, with purity of heart and actions.

“One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one”, answered Jesus, “is this: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12: 28-31).

If ever there was a ‘Theory of Everything’ about life, about our relationship with God, about why we are here on Earth and how we should conduct our relationships with one another, it is to be found in this profound answer given by Jesus Christ in the scripture above. I believe that this ‘Greatest Commandment’ will form a Common Rulebook to measure the quality of our lives when we each one day stand before God and the Books are opened. In other words, just how deeply did I love my Saviour while in the land of the living? Jesus stretches the measuring tape by distinguishing between love from the heart, the soul and the mind. And with all your strength. Should this measure make you uncomfortable, I assure you, that you are unlikely to be alone.

The second commandment is a conundrum of sorts. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ The question is, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Is my neighbour the fellow next door or the people down the road? Is s/he someone of similar ethnicity? People of the same nationality as I, perhaps? Or is my neighbour the whole of humanity? This could become a philosophical question having no easy answer, but Jesus once again makes it simple when he asks, while telling the parable of The Good Samaritan: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” (Luke 10:36).

How much do I really love myself? How are you to measure just how much you love yourself, so you can at least show others this same depth of love? A more philosophical poser, perhaps. Yet, there is again a helpful way offered by Jesus out of this dilemma: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31). It is the Golden Rule. How will God measure your life?

is the Managing Editor of Sunrise and Pastor of The Risen Christ, Knebworth. Twitter: @YinkaOduwole