Making a Difference, Part I

October 29, 2009 by Sal Termini.

Have you ever thought about your legacy?

Will people say kind things about you?

Will history be able to record that you made a difference in peoples lives for the better?

Will you be able to say, “my life counted for something?”

I have just asked you some probing questions. I fired one question after another at you. Every now and then we must evaluate what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. Let’s explore these questions together.

Legacy - An honorable legacy is leaving something good in the world after you are gone, perhaps even something ongoing.

Making a difference - Is helping to make someone else’s life better, not just your own.

Making your life count - The essence of life is that we lived helping to make the world we live in a better place.

What will people say about you? - If you were present at your eulogy would people say you made a difference in people’s lives for the better?

What we live for says a lot about us as a person. I think many of us never ask the deeper questions necessary for a fulfilled and genuinely happy life. Most people I know just want to be happy and don’t really understand how to live. We have been conditioned to believe that happiness comes from pursuing only our own personal goals.

If we are honest with ourselves people live in a use, use kind of existence. We care about one another but subconsciously we use each other for the goal of reaching our own personal happiness. Inevitably we will find our deepest motive is self satisfaction. We can be sad at the misfortune of others but our main focus is our happiness

I took some sociology courses in college and did some extended study on sociology web sites recently. One of the conclusions of sociologists was that truly happy people find lasting fulfillment when they help others. The core ideal was our fulfillment comes from not just meeting the expectations for our own lives but also bettering the lives of others.

An important moral questions we must ask ourselves is whether we are responsible solely for our own personal satisfaction or are we responsible to help others to also find happiness.

Jesus talks about this interconnectedness when He taught to love your neighbor as yourself.

Jesus was teaching us to have compassion. Jesus was teaching us to make compassion an integral part of our lives. He was teaching us to learn to truly care about others and not just on a superficial level. We must make compassion for others a personal goal and part of our overall strategy for our fulfillment and happiness.

Matt 9:36But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd.

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