Food for Thought - #7

"It's a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it." - Arnold Toynbee

I ran across this quote the other day, and to be honest, I didn't know what to think about it at first. I went through this whole process...enjoy the following trip inside my brain.

• Wait a second...that's the whole point of goals, is to reach them.
• If you aim for a more ambitious goal, you're still going to feel like a failure because you didn't reach that more ambitious goal...even if you did happen to complete a mini-goal on the way.
• Who cares about goals, anyway (ok...I didn't really say that...just making sure you're still with me).
• So, is the original goal, the goal...or is the ambitious goal, the goal!
• That's enough thinking for now...

Although, I can't quite follow this guys logic, and if he were in a true debate/discussion, I'm not so sure this would "hold up," but what I think he is trying to say is that we often set our goals way too low. So often, we are content with only accomplishing something relatively small, and that if we were to think "bigger" and more "audacious" that perhaps many of those smaller goals would be accomplished along the way.

So, you might be asking, how does this relate to parenting or my family. Glad you asked. My hunch is that many parents set very small goals for their parenting process. A few examples:

• "As long as they don't do drugs or drink alcohol, I'll have done my job."
• "If they like going to church, then I've done a good job."
• Here's a popular one, "if they make good grades, make a good score on their SAT, and get into a good college, then I've done a good job."
• And so on, and so on...I could go for a while.

I will never say that those things aren't important, but those are pretty "tiny" goals in the light of God and His kingdom. I think our goals ought to be a bit bigger than these. What they are for you? I don't know exactly for you...that's for you to determine!