The Path To Success

The pursuit for success is something into which we are launched from the womb. Even before we are born, our parents begin to pray for our well-being and good fortune. For the start they work at teaching us to talk and walk, then to read and write. They want us to learn to ride a bike and then to drive. They I aisle we finish high school and then on to college. They want very badly for us to succeed in life.

Success, is generally measured in terms of dollars and cents, so we are set on a path that hopefully will allow for the accumulation of wealth, which includes a good education, leading to a good job that will allow us to buy a nice house and put a tidy sum aside for retirement. Buying stuff along the way serves as an indicator of wealth accumulation, which assures us and others we are on the path to success. 

But are we indeed?  Will the path of wealth accumulation lead to success?  If we have a good job, a fine house, a fully vested 401K and lots of stuff, are we successful?  Not necessarily, wealthy people can be just as miserable as people in poverty. A study by the San Francisco Federal Reserve fond that "Keeping Up With The Jones" can increase the rate of suicide. 

Another study concluded that while poverty can be a major cause of misery, that location increased suicide rate. Living in a neighborhood among wealthier people where the income gap is more evident increases the misery factor. 

In "Business Insider's" Your Money section, Mandi Woodruff writes that while $34,000 is the misery line and $75,000 is the benchmark for financial happiness, earnings over that amount haven't been shown to increase happiness. In other words, having enough made a difference but having a lot did not.  Knowing your family would have a roof over their heads and food on the table increased the sense of well-being, while having more than one needed didn't seem to move the bubble. 

The deal is that having everything money can buy doesn't buy you happiness and can't fill the empty place in your soul only God can fill. After we have gotten every material thing we can imagine, we wind up asking, "Is that it?  Is that all there is to life?"  

King Solomon, after building cities and amassing untold fortune lamented,  "Yet, when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun" (Eccl 2:11). 

Jesus shines a light on our and Solomon's quandary: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matt 6:19-21). 

The study I referred to above is correct, location is important in raising the happiness factor. In fact, location is everything. If our path to success does not lead to and our wealth is not found in heaven, we will never have true, lasting and fulfilling wealth. Jus' Say'n.